Emotional geographies in extractivist contexts: protests against coal mining in Chhattisgarh, India

Keywords: Emotions ; India ; Extractivism ; Conflicts
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 25

Abstract

Natural resource extraction is rarely done in a non-violent context. Research show how communities living in resource-rich places are usually extirpated from their habitat, generating losses and disconnections on many levels: loss of livelihood rights, dispossession and dislocation, loss of spiritual connection, destruction of place-based ways of life (Padhi and Sadangi, 2020). These communities are often marginalized and indigenous groups, directly involved in a direct process of colonization and violence : they are at the global-local nexus.

Communities living the Hasdeo Arand region in the north of Chhattisgarh in India illustrates this reality because of the significant increase of coal mining in the region (Ghosh, 2016), as well as being at the heart of the Maoist insurgencies that mark the Indian subcontinent (Sundar, 2019). Through this case, this proposal wishes to explore the ways in which communities struggling against coal mining in this region known for its pristine forest and inhabitant by adivāsī communities, are daily in this continuum of peace and violence: violence is daily and is intrinsically linked to the colonial idea that the land is only exploitable and disconnected from the people who inhabit it.

Based on interviews with researchers, activists and lawyers, on blogs and court transcripts, this contribution mobilizes a feminist political ecology approach (Rocheleau et al., 1996; Elmhirst, 2015) to posit the variable of emotional geographies (Sultana, 2015) as central to understand this continuum of peace and violence in which communities at the heart of extractivism find themselves and in a “non-war” context.