Extractive Politics, Conflict and Peacebuilding (special issue of "Journal of Social Encounters")
Publisher: Journal of Social Encounters
Author(s): Selina Gallo-Cruz and Ron Pagnucco
Date: 2023
Topics: Conflict Causes, Extractive Resources, Governance
Countries: Colombia, Congo (DRC), Kenya, Mexico, Mozambique, Myanmar, Serbia, United States
The author's conversation with a representative of a well-known Liberian peacebuilding organization surveyed a wide range of challenges that peacebuilders encountered in post-war Liberia. They discussed difficult reconciliation work in a society left in ruins by a long and brutal civil war, entrenched misogyny perpetuating violence against women, and the sweeping retreat of funding following the Ebola crisis. At the end of our discussion, Thomas made a comment on a recent conflict that shifted my attention to the foundational role played by extractive politics in Liberia. His organization, known for its leadership in religious and nonviolent peacebuilding efforts, was called on by a mining company to help resolve violent protests among disgruntled community members. He explained that this was just one poignant example of how nonviolent conflict resolution had become recognized and incorporated into the institutional structure of local post-war politics. But not everyone who relied on his organization’s nonviolent conflict resolution work viewed it as a way of supporting the deeper structural transformation necessary to undo the inequities that so often fuel outbreaks of violence in the first place. For peacebuilders with an eye toward long-term stability, this disconnect is particularly problematic.
With this insight in mind, the role of extractive politics in Liberian inequities and conflicts across sectors becomes readily apparent. Initially, peacebuilders were able to create promising opportunities for reconciliation and reconstruction following the war. By the end of 2020, however, women’s incremental gains in leadership had dissipated and violence was erupting at the polls. Nobel Laureate Leymah Gbowee took to social media to plead with her fellow Liberians not to threaten the fragile peace they had worked so hard to achieve. Unemployment was on the rise again and infrastructure that had been damaged during the war still needed to be rebuilt across the country. In Liberian homes, the hardships of job insecurity and poverty intensified during the COVID-19 quarantine, during which women also bore the brunt of increased domestic violence. This spike in assaults brought women to the streets in protest and, in response, President George Weah declared a national rape emergency in September of 2020.
As the authors dug deeper into the many possible aggravators of post-war violence (Gallo-Cruz & Remsburg, 2021), they found that the greatest contributors to Liberia’s post-war economy, which generates nearly all of its foreign exports (EITI 2022), are the very same extractive industries that funded its long civil war and enabled a deep-seated culture of political corruption: forestry and mining. It is therefore difficult to consider improving Liberians’ lives without addressing the politics of its foreign-oriented extractive economy. But as a country plagued by the “resource curse,” an abundance of highly sought-after natural resources paired with the burden of debt and vulnerability to exploitation by multinational others, it seemed to Liberian leaders that the only reasonable way to rebuild after the war was to grant concession agreements to powerful and profitable foreign industries. My entrée into this problem in Liberia led to compounding concerns as I began to consider the environmental costs of neverending industrial growth, which disproportionately affects the world’s poor. I wanted to understand how peacebuilding programs in other countries dealing with extractive conflicts were faring. Further, I wanted to know how the field of peace studies was prepared to take on theincreasingly wicked problems so intimately tied to the violence and inequities animating our research as peace scholars. Thus, when Coordinating Editor Ron Pagnucco invited me to edit a special edition of the Journal of Social Encounters, this issue, “Extractive Politics, Conflict, and Peacebuilding” was born.
The author is delighted to present the following collection of excellent essays from scholars working around the world through a prism of peace studies frameworks.