This research is about territory, mining conflicts and social movements in South East Ecuador. The Andean country with no large scale mining history is experiencing a recent expansion of large scale mining with growing levels of social conflict. Social movements have been questioning and contesting the forms being taken by the extractive economy as well as proposing an alternative pathway to development through the indigenous concept of sumak kawsay. The Socialist Government is pushing the nation’s extractive model forward to include large scale mining, motivated by the much needed revenues to diversify Ecuador’s oil based economy. El Pangui, my field site, is located on the foothills of the Cordillera del Cóndor, where a large copper deposit is proposed to be developed by a Chinese mining corporation. The Cordillera is an area of great biological diversity and home to the traditional territories of the Shuar, one of the largest indigenous ethnic groups in Ecuador. The years of colonization of ancestral lands and of border war with Peru, the establishment of parks-for-peace, small scale gold mining activity and an expanding agricultural frontier, together have formed a complex territorial mosaic that contribute in shaping the social and physical landscapes. Since 2005 a mining conflict has been unfolding and that can be considered yet another layer of territorial disputes and symbolic contestation in the regions´ history. My fieldwork was carried out from an engaged research and activist scholarship position. I used an ethnographic methodology to explore the bidirectional influences of territorial dynamics and the anti-mining struggle by looking at multi scalar impacts these have on people’s daily life, corporate social responsibility and environmental development debates. I also looked at the ways in which memories and meanings associated with past conflicts resonate in subsequent resource struggles to form a layering of conflicts. I was particularly interested in the less visible dimensions of environmental mobilisation embedded in the routines of daily life, as well as in the ways in which the memory and history of territorialisation and settlement influence social movement organizing. Theoretically, I propose a territorial approach to studying natural resource struggles and social movements that contest mining. This concept allowed me to examine the effects of the extractive projects on pre-existing territorial dynamics and the influence of these dynamics on the ways in which mining investments are contested.

Conflicts between the mining industry and traditional communities have been challenging indigenous peoples’ rights and endangering the environment around the world. The purpose of this study is to gain a broad perspective on the role of media representations in framing (or misframing) justice (Fraser 2009) and in reflecting (or not) media responsibility (Silverstone 2017) when reporting such events. Although recent studies have analysed news media coverage of environmental conflicts from a similar theoretical approach, few studies have addressed this inquiry through narrative analysis. Particularly, considering cases from both developed and developing countries, different media ecologies (mainstream and alternative), and scales of production and distribution (national and international). This is the gap that motivates this study. The material consists of 54 articles from diverse new media sources that have reported on two contemporary mining conflicts: the Renca mining reserve in Brazil, and the Gállok/Kallak iron mine in Sweden. The analysis focuses on how the narrator conducts the stories by mapping and comparing the structural and discursive patterns found in the material. The findings show that, in both cases (Brazil and Sweden), the majority of narratives are grounded in Western-centric perspectives that tend to misframe justice. In contrast, the results suggest that fairer and more responsible narratives are the ones told from an absolute local (Cavarero 2012) perspective.

Les dynamiques du secteur minier péruvien entre la fin du XXe siècle et le début du XXIe siècle permettent de saisir la mondialisation économique comme un phénomène résolument spatial où se réinventent les territoires et les identités autour d’une ressource à la fois locale et globale. Dans cette thèse, nous montrons en quoi les nouvelles règles du jeu, notamment en matière minière et foncière ainsi que la gouvernance de l’environnement, illustrent la construction nécessairement politique du territoire péruvien et des ressources par l’État central autour d’un projet national d’exploitation marchande des gisements miniers comme source de richesse économique. La réorganisation de la structure productive nationale par le capital, souvent étranger, éclaire le poids des initiatives d’acteurs sur le devenir des territoires. La hausse de l’empreinte spatiale du secteur minier et des revenus qu’il génère atteste d’une greffe territoriale et économique de l’activité minière à l’échelle nationale. Néanmoins, celle-ci est inégalement ressentie dans les territoires locaux. La multiplication des conflits miniers au début du XXIe siècle rappelle que les ressources naturelles et les régulations qui codifient la relation société-nature sont le résultat souvent instable de relations de pouvoir entre acteurs aux poids asymétriques et aux visées potentiellement antagonistes. Nous analysons ces conflits interrogeant le rôle et la place des acteurs et des territoires locaux dans les politiques de développement, comme une arme de (re)négociation des règles du jeu à la portée des « sans ». D’intensité variable, la renégociation est micro quand les enjeux sont relativement limités et les acteurs entendent accéder à une meilleure répartition des richesses. Par contraste, elle est potentiellement massive quand ils refusent la marchandisation de la nature et entendent transformer en profondeur les règles du jeu comme l’illustre le conflit minier de Conga à Cajamarca. / Analysis of the dynamics of the mining sector in Peru between the end of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first allows an understanding of economic globalisation as a resolutely spatial phenomenon in which territories and identities are reinvented around resources at once local and global. In this thesis, we show how the new rules of the game of mining and property, and environmental governance, illustrate the necessarily political construction of Peru’s territory and resources by the central State around a national project of market-oriented exploitation of mining deposits as a source of economic wealth. This reorganisation of the national productive structure by capital, often foreign, sheds light on the impact of economic actors on the future of the territories. An increase of the spatial imprint of the mining sector and the revenue it generates amounts to a territorial and economic transplant of mining exploitation on a national scale. This increase, however, is felt unequally in local territories. The multiplication of mining conflicts at the start of the twenty-first century recalls how natural resources and the regulations codifying the society-nature relationship are the often unstable result of power relations between actors of unequal weight and with potentially antagonistic goals. We analyze these conflicts questionning the role and place of local actors and territories in development policies, as a weapon of (re)negotiation of the rules of the game wielded by the « have nots ». Varying in intensity, negotiations can be considered micro when the stakes are relatively limited and the actors only hope to achieve a greater share of the wealth. By contrast, conflicts may constitute a weapon of mass negotiation when actors refuse the commodification of nature and attempt a profound transformation of the rules of the game, as is illustrated by the Conga mining conflict in Cajamarca.