At any given moment in time, a community somewhere in the world is fighting for its right to existence, right to place, right to sovereignty over own life projects. The way we consume, organise our societies and imagine our futures continue to thrust extractivist agendas into more places and lives. Extractivism – the ideological paradigm that underpins this intensive remaking of nature into export commodities – as a mechanism of neo/colonialisms is certainly not new. However, we witness its acceleration under neoliberal governance over the last decades. As resource frontiers advance deeper and farther, mounting resistance from affected people expresses discontent and frustration with different manifestations of global socionatural order that facilitates extraction of nature, resources, meanings, lives.

This project traces and unpacks entanglements of multi-scalar valuations, discourses, practices behind making and unmaking of Kyrgyzstan into a resource frontier. Following a multi-method interdisciplinary research design combining in-depth ethnographic inquiry, behavioural experiments and surveys, I work towards an historico-geographical account of processes that have been and continue to rush and resist Kyrgyzstan’s gold expansion. Situated at the intersection of critical institutional economics, geography and anthropology, I mobilise a relational sociomaterial perspective that draws on interlinked registers of resource materialities, their valuations and governance for making sense of these processes.

Different stages of the underlying research have been financed by the THESys Graduate Programme, German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and Elsa-Neumann Early Career Scientist Fellowship of the Federal State of Berlin.

Output

Contact

Beril Ocaklı
Doctoral Researcher
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