Insurgent infrastructures: bottom-up infrastructure-building in gold-mining regions in Colombia and Suriname

ABSTRACT

Critical analyses of infrastructural violence have mostly approached infrastructure as a top-down imposition that allows markets and state governments to expand and inflicts suffering on local populations. Here we take as our analytical starting point a different kind of infrastructural harm, namely the one that comes not from building the local environment, but from leaving it unbuilt. From this vantage point, we are foremost interested in local forms of socio-spatial organization that emerge in regions suffering from political abandonment. Drawing on fieldwork in gold-mining regions in Colombia and Suriname, we show that in resource frontiers where people criticize the state for being absent, informal mining stakeholders create their own infrastructures that provide them with a means to gain legitimacy and protest their social exclusion. While these ‘insurgent infrastructures’ take place outside the legal framework, they create the symbolic and material conditions for the state to appear.

KEYWORDS:

• Infrastructure
• state formation
• small-scale mining
• gold
• Colombia
• Suriname

Acknowledgments

We want to thank the mining communities of Chocó and Suriname for making possible the research on which this article is based. Comments on an earlier version of the text by Yannis Kallianos, Dimitris Dalakoglou, and the three anonymous reviewers improved the argument. Any remaining mistakes are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Other analyses of ‘insurgent’ infrastructural practices have dealt with armed resistance against state bureaucracies (Gordillo, 2015; Haddad, 2018; Otero-Bahamon et al., 2021). As such, we are aware that our analytic of insurgence may run the risk of being read in this way and of evoking images of (armed) revolt; images that would be especially problematic for Colombia, where government discourses have typecast informal miners as criminal henchmen of non-state armed groups. We hope it is clear that when we speak of ‘insurgent infrastructures,’ we do not aim to reproduce these stereotypes—although we are of course aware of the extortion rackets and violence that paramilitaries and guerrillas inflict on Colombian mining regions. At the risk of stating the obvious, we use ‘insurgent’ not as a shorthand for (guerrilla) rebellion, but in the sense meant by Holston, namely in reference to the everyday organizational practices through which peripheralized populations ‘confront regimes of citizen inequality’ (2009, p. 245).

2 Given the violent repercussions they suffer when refusing to pay these ‘taxes,’ most miners view such protection money as brazen extortion.

3 Although in Chocó the notion of obra social may also be used to describe aspects of social assistance (for example, a political or community leader paying for a workshop, food rations, medical visits, or some cultural event), the term often has a physical connotation, being invoked in reference to material objects associated with development (e.g., roads, bridges, buildings, electrical grids, health clinics).

4 On such political mobilization, see also Jonkman (2021, pp. 48–49).

5 In this regard, our analysis departs somewhat from James Holston’s, seeing as he does draw attention to social movement organizing, arguing that insurgent forms of citizenship ‘are found both in organized grassroots mobilizations and in everyday practices that, in different ways, empower, parody, derail, or subvert state agendas’ (1998, p. 47). Having said that, for Holston, too, such grassroots influence on state agendas derives its political potentiality primarily from day-to-day struggles of place-making, which strikes a chord with what we highlight here. He writes: ‘My point is that it is not in the civic square that the urban poor articulate this demand [for “a life worthy of citizens”] with greatest force and originality. It is rather in the realm of everyday and domestic life taking shape in the remote urban peripheries around the construction of residence. It is an insurgence that begins with the struggle for the right to have a daily life in the city worthy of a citizen’s dignity’ (2009, p. 246).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Latin American Studies Programme [grant number NWO/022.006.014]; the GOMIAM research project [grant number NWO/W 07.68.301.00], the Graduate School of Social Sciences of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam [grant number FSW/2622104], the Board of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam [Aspasia 2016]; and the Gold Matters project of the Belmont Forum/NORFACE Joint Research Programme on Transformations to Sustainability [grant number 591-2017-04-05-08-04-08].

Notes on contributors

Jesse Jonkman

Jesse Jonkman is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Brunswick, as well as at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His work explores issues of resource extraction, governance, state formation, infrastructure, and cultural rights in Latin America, with a specific focus on Colombia.

Marjo de Theije

Marjo de Theije is professor of Anthropology of Resources at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Most of her research focuses on small-scale gold mining in the Amazon region, especially in Brazil and the Guianas.