Friday, February 28th, 2014 Movement, Place, and National Identity: Kyrgyzstan's Green Tinged Gold Mining Politics

Description

In her talk, Dr. Wooden will outline how fear about the environmental risks of gold mining in Kyrgyzstan has increasingly gained national political centrality, but has been at the heart of local opposition for more than a decade. Until recently, supporters of the industry have framed opposition to gold mining as merely manipulated by national and local elite economic interests and not “really green.” However, since 2010 the Kyrgyzstani national government has increasingly engaged in pro-environmental rhetoric, pursued compensation for supposed damage, debated mine nationalization, and taken a harder line regarding oversight, all policies closer to local residents’ environmental concerns despite the economic costs of these choices. Dr. Wooden will analyze why the recognition of this local environmental concern as a “real thing” has gained national currency, how that has contributed to policy action, and what are the changing discourses about nature exemplified in gold mining politics. In order to analyze these trends and adaptations, she dissects the various views about gold mining with environmental content, and reports results from a national public opinion survey and interviews she conducted from 2009 to 2013. This is a dynamic picture of the politics of place, where protest movements are separated by village but share a changing national consciousness about what Kyrgyzstanis value about nature. There are apt comparisons of this anti-industrialization, (at times) nationalistic discourse to similar anti-mining debates elsewhere; thus this case may be illustrative of emerging global political trends in the 21st century era of environmental uncertainty.

Dr. Amanda E. Wooden is an Associate Professor in the Environmental Studies Program at Bucknell University, Pennsylvania (US) and editor of “The CESS Blog” for the Central Eurasian Studies Society. She earned her Ph.D. in International Relations and Public Policy at Claremont Graduate University. Dr. Wooden served as Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Economic and Environmental Officer for the Osh, Kyrgyzstan field office in 2006-07. Her publications include “Another Way of Saying Enough: Environmental Concern and Popular Mobilization in Kyrgyzstan” Post-Soviet Affairs (2013), “Water Resources, Institutions, and Intrastate Conflict” Political Geography (2010) with Ismene Gizelis, and the edited volume The Politics of Transition in Central Asia & the Caucasus: Enduring Legacies and Emerging Challenges (2009) with Christoph Stefes.