Protecting the Capital? On African Geographies of Protest Escalation and Repression
Publisher: Political Geography
Author(s): Jessica Steinberg
Date: 2018
Topics: Conflict Prevention, Dispute Resolution/Mediation, Governance
Anecdotal evidence suggests that states resort to force to protect economic assets threatened by conflict, yet there has been limited investigation into whether states systematically rely on repression to do so. The Indonesian government responded to protests around a major copper mine with a violent campaign (Allard, 2005), while the Chinese government has used violence in response to protests near a major manganese mine (Jigang & Chuchua, 2008). In Africa, similar incidents of repression of protests and demonstrations near mining sites in Madagascar, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, and South Africa (Downey, Bonds and Clark, 2010). Underlying these anecdotes is the assumption that regions with fixed economic assets, such as natural resource extractive sites are of strategic importance to governments. To what extent does the strategic importance of these regions of natural resource extraction lead governments, and for that matter, local communities, to behave somehow differently in these regions in comparison to others?
The geographic distribution of political and economic assets ensures that some subnational spaces are of more strategic importance than others. While studies of conflict and repression have considered that proximity to a political capital shapes conflict behavior, to date there is no systematic empirical evaluation of spatial variation in behavior of governments or local opposition in and around regions of particular economic importance, such as natural resource extractive sites. In this paper, I evaluate the geography of repression and escalation to assess a) whether governments are more likely to repress instances of social mobilization that are in close proximity to fixed economic asset, b) whether protestors are more likely to escalate in close proximity to these regions of strategic importance to the state, and c) how proximity to an economic asset may create a different strategic context than proximity to a political capital. To do so, I rely on a dataset of social conflict events and mining projects active in Africa between 1990 and 2014.