Insurgent infrastructures: bottom-up infrastructure-building in gold-mining regions in Colombia and Suriname

Abstract

Critical analyses of infrastructural violence have mostly approached infrastructure as a top-down imposition that allows markets and state governments to expand and inflicts suffering on local populations. Here we take as our analytical starting point a different kind of infrastructural harm, namely the one that comes not from building the local environment, but from leaving it unbuilt. From this vantage point, we are foremost interested in local forms of socio-spatial organization that emerge in regions suffering from political abandonment. Drawing on fieldwork in gold-mining regions in Colombia and Suriname, we show that in resource frontiers where people criticize the state for being absent, informal mining stakeholders create their own infrastructures that provide them with a means to gain legitimacy and protest their social exclusion. While these ‘insurgent infrastructures’ take place outside the legal framework, they create the symbolic and material conditions for the state to appear.