Making peace with the mining past? The politics of value and citizenship in Thio, New Caledonia (original) (raw)

Abstract

Mining is an old and contentious issue in New Caledonia, one so deeply entrenched in the history of Thio (situated on the south east coast of the island) that it has become part and parcel of local society. More precisely, the SLN (Société Le Nickel), which is the historical and hegemonic mining company in Thio, is perceived and challenged by the local population against this background, meaning as a peculiar local citizen embedded in a web of rights and duties. This emic view of corporate social responsibility has recently been activated by exceptional rain events and recurring environmental damages. A strong social movement was born out of these events, blocking the mining sites, composing a list of grievances and claiming for environmental restoration (rather than ecological or monetary compensation). This collective action associated with the role of a few leaders or brokers has turned into an association whose name means “taking care of the home/community” and explicitly claims an inter-ethnic constituency at the municipal level. This work thus explores how this chain of events interacts with other contemporary sequences (legal procedures of mining sites regularization, new prospecting campaigns) and older event and memory chains, including the historical trajectory of SLN in Thio as both a firm and a para-state institution, as well as various conflicts between Kanak peoples and mining companies around local sovereignty (including the sequence of violent civil/anti-colonial clashes of 1984-87 euphemized as “the events”). The resulting dialectic is a politics of compressed place (communal localization and infra-communal segmentary tendencies) and extended time (mining memory, policy and prospect) influencing the local politics of value, belonging and citizenship in Thio.

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