(Re)producing the socio-natural landscape at Amulsar, Armenia: contesting extractive imperialisms and resistant local socio-natures

Application summary

This research will analyze the (re)production of the socio-natural landscape in a post-Soviet state as simultaneously shaped by extractive imperialisms and struggles against resource exploitation. The project explores the changing socio-natural landscape in a post-soviet state through the case of the Amulsar gold mine in Armenia. The theoretical focus will be on 3 mutually (re)constituting processes: state-in-the-making, resource-making, and local socio-natures. Amulsar mine is analyzed as a case where the Armenian state in flux, contesting “Western” and Russian development projects, and the frontline humans and non-humans come together to transform – or defend – the local environments and reshape policies and politics around them. The project is informed by political ecological research, placing nature in the discussion of geographies of power, and assemblage thinking, aiming to transcend human exceptionalism and understand the phenomena as based on the changing composition of human and non-human relations. Departing from recent literature on extractivism that focuses predominantly on Latin America, Africa and South-East Asia, the project will enrich the existing literature with the previously scantly investigated regional perspective. The research will show how (re)production of the socio-natural landscape is shaped by global and regional power dynamics and dynamics within local socio-natures by looking at Amulsar from 3 intersecting angles: Amulsar as an extractive project; Amulsar as a habitat of the local socio-nature; and Amulsar as a space of resistance. The methods include document analysis, ethnography and interviews with activists, local residents, state officials, and company representatives. The project will contribute to more diverse understanding of global extractivisms, focusing on state-in-the-making, resource-making, and local socio-natures in the context of scantly investigated former Soviet countries, and their complex multi-scalar linkages.