Resource Extraction and Contentious States

Mining and the Politics of Scale in the Pacific Islands

Matthew G. Allen

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9789811081200
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

This Pivot offers a comprehensive cross-country study of the effects of large-scale resource extraction in Asia Pacific, considering how large-scale extractive industries engender contentious social, political and economic questions. Addressing the strong association in Melanesia between extractive resource industries and a spectrum of violence ranging from interpersonal to collective forms, it questions whether islands are particularly potent spaces for the contentious politics that attend enclave economies. The book brings island studies literature into a closer conversation with political and economic geography, demonstrating that islands provide rich spaces for the investigation of the socio-spatial relations at the heart of human geography's theoretical cannon. The book also has a real-world policy edge, as the sustained and growing dominance of extractive industries, in concert with the highly contentious politics that they engender, places them at the centre of efforts to understand state formation, political reordering and the on-going negotiation of political settlements of various types throughout post-colonial Melanesia. It considers how extractive resource industries can shape processes of state formation, shedding new light on Melanesia's resource curse.

© The Author(s) 2018

Matthew G. AllenResource Extraction and Contentious Stateshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8120-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Matthew G. Allen¹

(1)

University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji

Abstract

This chapter introduces the book’s overall storyline: social, political and economic struggles over large-scale resource extraction are inherently spatialised, and islands can provide especially potent settings for the contentious and frequently violent politics of resource access and control. The chapter reviews the key concepts that frame the book’s arguments—drawn from human geography, political ecology and the emerging island studies literature—and describes the primary research, case studies and data that are drawn upon in developing the book’s arguments. It also introduces the Solomons Group of islands, which is the book’s geographical focus, and provides a brief account of the historical production of ‘islandness’ in Melanesia. Finally, the chapter provides an overview of the book’s structure and summaries of each of the five chapters that follow.

Keywords

Extractive resource conflictThe politics of scalePolitical ecologyMiningIslandnessMelanesia

End Abstract

Violent conflict related to natural resources is both a global phenomenon and a ‘wicked problem’. According to the United Nations, 40 per cent of all intra-state conflicts since the Second World War have been “associated with natural resources” (UNEP 2009). While conflicts over the increasing scarcity of natural resources, such as oil and fresh water, have loomed large in the popular imagination, many of these intra-state conflicts have actually been associated with the abundance of natural resources, such as timber, minerals and oil and gas, rather than their scarcity. Extractive resource conflict , as I shall refer to this form of natural resource conflict, is commonly understood to be a sub-set of the equally pernicious and intractable ‘resource curse’ : a paradoxical phenomenon whereby developing countries that enjoy a wealth of natural resources tend to perform relatively poorly across the spectrum of social and economic development indicators. However, while a large corpus of studies have demonstrated clear correlations between natural resource abundance and violent intra-state conflict (e.g. Ross 2004), predominantly in developing-country contexts (with the paradigmatic examples being the ‘diamond wars’ of sub-Saharan Africa), the causal linkages remain hotly debated by social scientists, as do the most appropriate policy approaches for reducing the likelihood of extractive resource conflict.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, an influential but controversial thesis was put forward by economists to explain the causes of extractive resource conflicts in the global South (e.g. Collier and Hoeffler 2004). This became known as the ‘greed-not-grievance’ thesis, which, in keeping with the tenets of neo-classical economics, emphasised the rational motives of individual actors; civil wars in developing countries, we were told, are driven by the ‘greed’ of those who participate in them rather than by ‘objective’ grievances such as inequality or political oppression. The greed-not-grievance thesis produced a furore amongst social scientists with an interest in intra-state conflict in developing-country settings and for whom explanations based on rational actor models of behaviour were starkly devoid of historical context and consideration of the wider structures of social relations that influence both individual and collective action. A ‘beyond greed and grievance’ literature emerged that has redoubled efforts to develop sophisticated and fine-grained understandings of the causes and dynamics of developing-country conflicts, often based on detailed case studies (e.g. Ballentine and Sherman 2003). It is this literature, and its attendant intellectual and policy agendas, that I hope this short book will contribute to and, in some small way, advance.

Political ecology , a field of study that has long focused on “the conflicts and struggles engendered by the forms of access to and control over resources” (Peluso and Watts 2001, p. 25), has been at the vanguard of these efforts. It has provided innovative conceptual and methodological tools and approaches for rethinking the extractive resource conflict conundrum. It is within this strand of the beyond greed and grievance project—the political ecology strand—that this study is situated. Moreover, while political ecology has been informed by several disciplines, above all it is from the discipline of human geography—the custodian of the study of space and society—that political ecology has derived its most fundamental theoretical orientations. As such, this book offers a geographical perspective on extractive resource conflict , specifically conflicts related to large-scale mining , from the world’s largest geographical region, the Pacific Ocean or Oceania, once famously described by the late Tongan writer and intellectual Epeli Hau’ofa (1994) as “our sea of islands ” (see Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

The Pacific Islands

With a particular focus on the Solomons Group of islands—consisting of Bougainville , an autonomous region of Papua New Guinea (PNG) , and the neighbouring archipelagic nation of Solomon Islands (see Fig. 1.2)—the book offers a cross-country study of the political ecology of large-scale mining and violent conflict in the Pacific culture area known as Melanesia (see Fig. 1.1). There has been much social science research conducted on large-scale resource extraction in Melanesia , particularly in PNG , arguably one of the most ‘resource-cursed’ nations on earth (e.g. Bainton 2010; Golub 2014; Kirsch 2014). While the studies to date have mostly taken the form of detailed ethnographic analyses of individual projects and their articulations with “host communities”, a number of researchers have explicitly examined geographical or political ecology dimensions of large-scale mining in the region (e.g. Allen 2013b; Banks 2005, 2008; Connell and Howitt 1991; Horowitz 2009). My study builds upon the latter work by deepening the attention to what geographers refer to as socio-spatial relations , such as territoriality and the politics of scale , concepts that I will explain below. In doing so, the book engages with comparative scholarship, especially from Nigeria , to demonstrate how large-scale extractive industries can engender contentious politics that are fundamentally spatialised and are best understood with reference to the pre-existing social, political and ecological landscapes into which extractive projects are inserted. We will see that the book’s political ecology approach, which emphasises questions of scale , power, territory and identity, and is attentive to pluralist conceptions of ‘development’ and the Nature/Society nexus , distinguishes it from much of the existing scholarship on phenomena such as the resource curse and extractive resource conflict in Melanesia and the wider Pacific Islands.

Fig. 1.2

The Solomons Group

The book is concerned with a salient dimension of Melanesia’s resource curse : the strong association between extractive resource industries and violence of various types and scales , an association that, as we have already seen, is by no means unique to Melanesia . The spectrum of mining’s violence in Melanesia has ranged from the interpersonal, including family and gender-based violence, through to various forms of collective violence, such as riots, identity-based militancy and full-scale secessionist conflict. Even on the tiny Polynesian island of Rennell , part of Solomon Islands , recent bauxite mining activities have been engendering violent local responses. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to name a single extractive project in Melanesia that has not produced violence of some form. Melanesia’s extractive economies have been, and continue to be, extremely violent ones.

Nowhere has this been more apparent than on Bougainville and on Guadalcanal in Solomon Islands , islands that have hosted the region’s two most serious armed conflicts since the Second World War, with large-scale mining deeply implicated in both cases albeit to very different extents. Given that these conflicts occurred on islands, I also ask whether there is something peculiar about islands—their “islandness ” as it is referred to in the burgeoning island studies literature (e.g. Baldacchino 2004)—that makes them unusually or exceptionally potent spaces for the contentious politics that attend extractive enclave economies. At a theoretical level, then, another key objective of the book is to bring the island studies literature into a closer conversation with political and economic geography. Indeed, I hope to demonstrate that islands provide rich spaces for the investigation of the socio-spatial relations that lie at the heart of human geography’s theoretical cannon.

The book’s arguments also have an urgent, real-world, policy edge. The sustained and growing dominance of extractive industries in the economies of PNG and Solomon Islands , in concert with the highly contentious politics they engender, places them at the centre of efforts to understand state formation, political reordering and the on-going negotiation of political settlements of various types throughout post-colonial Melanesia . This is especially true on Bougainville where the future of large-scale mining is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Panguna and the Bougainville Crisis
• 3. Reopening Panguna
• 4. The Solomon Islands “Tension”
• 5. Mining in Contemporary Solomon Islands
• 6. Conclusion
• Back Matter