Corporate-Community Mining Conflicts in Guatemala: Unsettling Hegemonic Power Relations in Environmental Struggles

<p>This dissertation analyzes corporate-community conflicts around extractive industries in Guatemala with the purpose of better understanding how environmental struggles emerge and take shape. The study uses environmental governance as a framework to analyze the processes, institutions, actors and discourses that shape the conditions of possibility of political action and mobilization in environmental struggles. The dissertation argues that to understand the conditions of possibility of political action and mobilization in environmental struggles we must study the interplay between political actions 'from above' and 'from below', which are seen as dialectically interrelated, with dynamic and contested interactions between actors within and between scales.</p> <p>Environmental struggles are understood as part of emergent forms of scalar politics wherein different actors struggle to (re)consolidate power and authority in the hands of competing groups. The complex ways in which corporate-elite-government-military networks shape political actions in environmental conflicts intersects with the strategies of grassroots movements, who themselves are engaged in multi-scalar contentious politics. Spatialities shape the conditions of possibility for political action. They matter for the imaginaries, material practices and emergent trajectories of environmental struggles. By examining the shifting spatialities of political actions we can reveal the articulations of emergent power relations and make visible some of the power geometries in environmental struggles.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Year dc:date.available

2019

Author dc:creator

• Sveinsdóttir, Anna Guðbjört

Contributors dc:contributor

• Matthew J. Taylor, Ph.D.
• Mariel Aguilar-Støen, Ph.D.

• Contentious politics
• Environmental conflicts
• Environmental governance
• Extractive industries
• Geography
• Guatemala
• Environmental Studies
• Nature and Society Relations
• Physical and Environmental Geography

Statement dc:rights

• <p>Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.</p>

Language dc:language

en

Repository record dc:identifier

https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd/1626

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digitalcommons.du.edu:etd-2626