Environmental violence and crises of legitimacy in New Caledonia

This paper addresses the question of what factors besides resource abundance or scarcity play crucial roles in conditioning resource-related violent conflict, by investigating the responses of residents of villages near a mining project in New Caledonia to Rhéébù Nùù, an indigenous environmental protest group. An overlooked and yet crucial factor in local support for Rhéébù Nùù was a lack of faith in the government and, more fundamentally, in the democratic system through which representatives were elected. Instead, villagers put their faith in a revitalization of customary authority. Thus, environmental violence is not driven simply by resource abundance or scarcity; in this instance, it masked a crisis of political legitimacy, grounded in a history of opposition to the colonial power. This leads to the paper's second question: What constitutes a basis for political legitimacy, and how is this legitimacy – and its contestation – mediated by socio-cultural concerns? This study suggests that legitimacy requires the achievement of three elements: representation of people's interests, coherence with cultural identity, and popular acceptance of methods used to exert power. The protest group was more successful at achieving these elements of legitimacy, and thus the support of the local residents, than was either the government or the mining company. However, not all community members felt that Rhéébù Nùù indeed had the support of customary authority, and many disagreed with the group's violent tactics. Thus, protest groups may be subject to the same criteria of legitimacy as the governments or other bodies that they oppose.     

Of “madness,” against Babylon: A story of resistance, (mis)representation,and paradox in the Caribbean

This article provides a postcolonial feminist account of the complex politics of the Earth People, an anti-systemic movement in Trinidad and Tobago who organised against the post-independence status quo during the 1970–1980s. The purpose of the piece is twofold. Firstly, on a scholarly level, it endeavours to (re)tell a theoretically-driven empirically-based story of the nuances that surfaced during the Earth People's resistance to “Babylon” (i.e. racial capitalism, Western institutions, rise of a post-colonial nationalist bourgeoisie). Secondly, on a political-epistemological level, we are countering conventional ways Caribbean people, histories, social movements, and the region at large are documented, studied, and ultimately written about within mainstream academia. To do so, we outline the fraught politics of (mis)representation that arise in established ethnography, with specific care afforded to the perspectives and political agency of participants from the movement. Our analysis emerges out of fieldwork guided by critical race theories, decolonial critique, feminist ethics, and community collaboration. Our methods included archival research, focus groups, oral histories, go-along interviews, and narrative inquiry with former members of the group. In general, the piece historicises the Earth People's efforts to evade and defy colonial norms, capitalist logics, and Westminster state power by “returning to nature.” Further, we offer a synopsis of movement's worldviews, social relations, and ideological standpoints, which despite being episodically paradoxical and not adopted widely throughout the Caribbean, merit further respective attention and critical scrutiny apropos regional posterity and orthodox academic knowledge production.     

Fleshing out the geographies of social movements: Colombia's Pacific coast black communities and the ‘aquatic space’

The intersections between the concepts of space, place and resistance have recently received increasing attention from geographers dedicated to the study of social movements. Space and place are not merely seen as providing a physical background for mobilisations but as mutually constitutive of social movement agency. Yet, critics of theoretical frameworks drawn up by geographers have often rightly pointed to the lack of convincing empirical evidence presented in their support.This paper addresses these critiques by offering a theoretically informed and empirically grounded account of recent mobilisations by the social movement of black communities in the Pacific coast region of Colombia. Drawing on both the objective aspects of place and the subjective feelings that are derived from living in a place, I will show how these mechanisms have impacted on the specific spatial organising forms adopted by black communities. In particular, I will propose the concept of ‘aquatic space’ as a set of spatialised social relationships among Afro-Colombians, and show how these concrete everyday geographies have been drawn upon by black communities in the establishment of community councils along river basins.The paper argues that to make a strong point for more spatially sensitive analyses of social movements, geographers have to sustain their theoretical frameworks with concrete empirical data that not only illustrate spatial processes at play, but also convincingly demonstrate their very embeddedness in social practice. I thus argue for a strong consideration of ethnographies as a privileged research methodology to flesh out the geographies of social movements.