Stories of Resistance: Translating Nature, Indigeneity, and Place in Mining Activism

Abstract

The chapter by Li and Paredes Peñafiel explores the manifold interconnections between community-based resistance and national as well as international activist networks. They trace the organised opposition to a proposed mining project in Peru’s Northern Highlands (the Conga mine) and how local activism travels through documentaries, news media, lawsuits, and networks. Analysing the international reverberations of the conflict and activist efforts, they interrogate the emergence of key leaders—particularly women—and how they and media actors represent the conflict. These representations of environmental conflict in Peru also gain importance elsewhere, and the authors explore how they both travel and translate into a situation of increasing resistance to extraction in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Local resistance thus reverberates and spreads and may challenge the logic of extractivism by opening up a space for alternative life-making projects that both transcend and communicate between connections to a local landscape.