Production After Harm: A Political Economy of Resource Conflict in Peru

How does resource conflict become an object of regulation? This ethnography of social conflict management examines how agreements and peaceful deliberation are used to prevent protests over mining in Peru. Through the policy of diálogo, state officials and company representatives connect the complex harms people experience to a restricted field of potential “benefits.” In exchange for deferring their grievances, populations affected by extraction produce promises for start-up capital, wage labor, and public infrastructure. By turning promises into a mode of government, I find that diálogo makes “conflicts” recurrent. My work shows how efforts to control “conflict” end up creating the very grounds for mobilization that diálogo seeks to foreclose.

Meeting ID: 997-6108-0101

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