Peasants, firms, and activists in the struggle over gold mining in Guatemala: Shifting landscapes of extraction and resistance

Over the past two decades, the rise of small exploration companies and the movement of investment capital in mineral exploration into new regions of the developing world have transformed the global gold mining industry. At the same time, mineral conflicts in peasant host communities are on the rise. This dissertation seeks to understand this resistance as a function of new dynamics of social configurations between mining firms, anti-mining activist networks, and the host community under late neoliberal globalization.;Central America exemplifies these new investment and extraction trends in gold. Mineral exploration has grown by 1,000 percent in Guatemala since the 1990s, bringing about an active and broad-based opposition movement. Drawing from the cases of Guatemala and El Salvador, I explore resistance and acquiescence to gold mining with a wide lens. Using original interview and survey data. I weave together discussions of identity politics, global indigenous rights norms, mineral geology, and land tenure, among other concepts, to illuminate the social dynamics of mining conflicts in Guatemala. and by extension, the neoliberalization of nature writ large.;Resistance to Guatemala's mineral-led development project stems from a complex amalgam of cognitive and emotional responses on the part of host community residents to land tenure insecurity and the entrepreneurial behaviors of the anti-mining activist network, all of which is underpinned by the aggressiveness of new gold mining.;The substantive chapters of this dissertation deal with these issues individually. The first chapter examines the global gold mining industry and theorizes the industrial transformations of the past two decades. The second chapter critiques the role of activist networks in organizing against mining in the context of a municipal referendum to exercise Mayan peasants' right to free, prior and informed consent. The third chapter develops the concept of the global indigenous rights regime to illuminate the processes of discursive production of indigenous identity by the different stakeholders involved in the public debate around mining in Guatemala. The fourth and final chapter explores differential peasant responses to mining and argues that the social meaning of land shapes peasants' rejection and acceptance of mining in their territories.