Slow violence in mining and crude oil extractive frontiers: The overlooked resource curse in the Colombian internal armed conflict

Abstract

Geographies of extraction have often been marked by poor economic growth, dispossession and armed conflicts, leading to the idea that resource abundance can be a curse for developing nations. However, this dialectic may be too narrow to address the complexities of slow, structural and direct violence as intertwined features of extractivism in contexts of armed conflicts. To make sense of this phenomenon, we inquire the socio-ecological impacts of slow violence in Colombia at the edge of two extractive frontiers. First, we look at the interface between government-led extractivism, the bombing of oil pipelines by leftist guerrillas, and the degradation of traditional livelihoods of communities living on the extractive oil frontiers. And second, we explore the disputed use of mercury in artisanal and small-scale gold mining, an activity increasingly controlled and secured by illegal armed groups in contemporary gold bonanzas.