From a world history perspective, the most noticeable trend in the history of the late 19th century was the domination of Europeans over Non­Europeans. This domination took many forms ranging from economic penetration to outright annexation. No area of the globe, however remote from Europe, was free of European merchants, adventurers, explorers or western missionaries. Was colonialism good for either the imperialist or the peoples of the globe who found themselves subjects of one empire or another? A few decades ago, the answer would have been a resounding no. Now, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the more or less widespread discrediting of Marxist and Leninist analysis, and the end of the Cold War, political scientists and historians seem willing to take a more positive look at Nineteenth Century Imperialism. One noted current historian, Niall Ferguson has argued that the British Empire probably accomplished more positive good for the world than the last generation of historians, poisoned by Marxism, could or would concede. Ferguson has argued that the British Empire was a \" liberal \" empire that upheld international law, kept the seas open and free, and ultimately benefited everyone by ensuring the free flow of trade. In other words, Ferguson would find little reason to contradict the young Winston Churchill's assertion that the aim of British imperialism was to: give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to place the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain. It should come as no surprise that Ferguson regards the United States current position in the world as the natural successor to the British Empire and that the greatest danger the U.S. represents is that the world will not get enough American Imperialism because U.S. leaders often have short attention spans and tend to pull back troops when intervention becomes unpopular. It will be very interesting to check back into the debate on Imperialism about ten years from now and see how Niall Ferguson's point of view has fared! The other great school of thought about Imperialism is, of course, Marxist. For example, Marxist historians like E.J. Hobsbawm argue that if we look at the l9th century as a great competition for the world's wealth and …

The New Imperialism

The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society

The last decade and a half has witnessed a dramatic growth in mining activity in many developing countries. This article reviews these recent trends and describes the debates and conflicts they have triggered. The authors review evidence regarding debates on the resource curse and the possibility of an extraction-led pathway to development. They then describe the different types of resistance and social mobilization that have greeted mineral expansion at a range of geographical scales, and consider how far these protests have changed the relationships between mining and political economic change. The conclusions address how far such protests might contribute to an ‘escape’ from the resource curse, and consider implications for research and policy agendas.

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Contention and Ambiguity: Mining and the Possibilities of Development

One of the causes of the increasing number of ecological distribution conflicts around the world is the changing metabolism of the economy in terms of growing flows of energy and materials. There are conflicts on resource extraction, transport and waste disposal. Therefore, there are many local complaints, as shown in the Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJatlas) and other inventories. And not only complaints; there are also many successful examples of stopping projects and developing alternatives, testifying to the existence of a rural and urban global movement for environmental justice. Moreover, since the 1980s and 1990s, this movement has developed a set of concepts and campaign slogans to describe and intervene in such conflicts. They include environmental racism, popular epidemiology, the environmentalism of the poor and the indigenous, biopiracy, tree plantations are not forests, the ecological debt, climate justice, food sovereignty, land grabbing and water justice, among other concepts. These term...

Is there a global environmental justice movement

Sustainability science has grown as a field of inquiry, but has said little about the role of large-scale private sector actors in socio-ecological systems change. However, the shaping of global trends and transitions depends greatly on the private sector and its development impact. Market-based and command-and-control policy instruments have, along with corporate citizenship, been the predominant means for bringing sustainable development priorities into private sector decision-making. This research identifies conflict as a further means through which environmental and social risks are translated into business costs and decision making. Through in-depth interviews with finance, legal, and sustainability professionals in the extractive industries, and empirical case analysis of 50 projects worldwide, this research reports on the financial value at stake when conflict erupts with local communities. Over the past decade, high commodity prices have fueled the expansion of mining and hydrocarbon extraction. These developments profoundly transform environments, communities, and economies, and frequently generate social conflict. Our analysis shows that mining and hydrocarbon companies fail to factor in the full scale of the costs of conflict. For example, as a result of conflict, a major, world-class mining project with capital expenditure of between US$3 and US$5 billion was reported to suffer roughly US$20 million per week of delayed production in net present value terms. Clear analysis of the costs of conflict provides sustainability professionals with a strengthened basis to influence corporate decision making, particularly when linked to corporate values. Perverse outcomes of overemphasizing a cost analysis are also discussed.

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Conflict translates environmental and social risk into business costs

http://www.iheal.univ-paris3.fr/sites/www.iheal.univ-paris3.fr/files/%21%21%20bebbington%20andes.pdf

Mining and social movements: struggles over livelihood and rural territorial development in the Andes

Social movements have been viewed as vehicles through which the concerns of poor and marginalised groups are given greater visibility within civil society, lauded for being the means to achieve local empowerment and citizen activism, and seen as essential in holding the state to account and constituting a grassroots mechanism for promoting democracy. However, within development studies little attention has been paid to understanding how social movements can affect trajectories of development and rural livelihood in given spaces, and how these effects are related to movements' internal dynamics and their interaction with the broader environment within which they operate. This paper addresses this theme for the case of social movements protesting contemporary forms of mining investment in Latin America. On the basis of cases from Peru and Ecuador, the paper argues that the presence and nature of social movements has significant influences both on forms taken by extractive industries (in this case mining), and on the effects of this extraction on rural livelihoods. In this sense one can usefully talk about rural development as being co-produced by movements, mining companies and other actors, in particular the state. The terms of this co-production, however, vary greatly among different locations, reflecting the distinct geographies of social mobilisation and of mineral investment, as well as the varying power relationships among the different actors involved.

Mining and social movements: struggles over Mining and social movements: struggles over livelihood and rural territorial development in the Andes

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1265582_code1050353.pdf?abstractid=1265582&mirid=1&type=2

Mining and Social Movements: Struggles over Livelihood and Rural Territorial Development in the Andes

Los movimientos sociales frente a la minería: disputando el desarrollo territorial andino

Agriculture is the backbone of the Ghanaian economy. It plays an important role in the socioeconomic development of Ghana as it contributes to ensuring food security, provides raw materials for local industries, generates foreign exchange, and provides employment and incomes for most of the population (especially those living in the rural areas), thereby contributing to economic development and poverty reduction. The central goal of Ghanaâs current development strategy, which is detailed in the Poverty Reduction Strategy II (GPRS-II), is to accelerate economic growth in order to achieve middle-income status within a measurable planning period. Subsequently, the government has placed a focus on implementing agricultural policies to bring more land under cultivation in order to generate a rapid supply response that will quickly benefit the poor in rural areas.1 These interventions are also intended to help develop a private agricultural sector that contributes to accelerated and sustained growth in the long run. Monitoring and evaluating the progress of these initiatives requires quality agricultural data for large-scale and household-based production that is collected frequently (in order to address the dynamics of agricultural production) on a spatially disaggregated level. This suggests the need for a system that regularly produces precise agricultural statistics on an annual basis at the district level. This is an important consideration because numerous interventions are currently implemented at that administrative level and many more will be operationalized at the district level in the future as Ghana continues to decentralize. However, recent data gathering activities by the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) and the Statistics, Research, and Information Directorate (SRID) of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) do not currently meet these requirements. Future agricultural surveys must address this gap in order to support the governmentâs interventions and planning processes and, in turn, maximize the effectiveness of agricultural growth and poverty reduction efforts.

Juan Pablo Muñoz

Papers

Mining and social movements: struggles over livelihood and rural territorial development in the Andes

Mining and social movements: struggles over Mining and social movements: struggles over livelihood and rural territorial development in the Andes

Mining and Social Movements: Struggles over Livelihood and Rural Territorial Development in the Andes

Los movimientos sociales frente a la minería: disputando el desarrollo territorial andino

A strategy for agricultural Statistics in Ghana