(Un)Making the “Mining Town”: Grounding Institutional Strategies and Consequences in the Argentine Anti-Mining Movement

• In Event: How Repression and Resistance Take PLACE

Abstract

Although scholars recognize that movements target multiple institutions, we still tend to analyze their political and cultural consequences separately. This reflects a tendency to treat movements and institutions as “placeless”—as relational arenas rather than spatially embedded forms. Thus, I argue that we need to “ground” our research to better understand how movements seek to consolidate power over place. Drawing on qualitative empirical data from the Argentine anti-mining movement, I analyze how activists fight with multinational corporations to define the community as a “mining” or “anti-mining town.” As such, they seek strategic control over local institutions and, thereby, the cultural and political organization of space. By comparing the trajectories of four communities, I find that they try to infiltrate existing institutions, create new alternative organizations, or a combination of both. Variations in these tactics produce different levels of institutional saturation, which affects long-term control over how the community categorizes itself and distributes resources. In this way, I argue that institutions are both arenas and outcomes for social movements. Moreover, institutions – and the battle for them – are grounded in concrete spaces. While “place” can get lost in analyzing large-scale social movements, even these struggles are ultimately a series of local contests over institutional control, community definition, and the organization of everyday life.

Author

• Allison Fraser Lang, University of Texas-Austin