Abstract
The concept of accumulation by dispossession is often mobilized in political ecological and geographical literature, to explain the ways that capitalist accumulation depends on the violent and extra-economic seizure of land and resources. Yet dispossession is also mobilized as a fear about the future, as a way of articulating historical and non-capitalist motivations for land expropriation, and as an avenue for political action. Amid negotiations for a heavy mineral sands mine in the Casamance region of Senegal, narratives of dispossession circulated frequently, even though no mining had yet taken place. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews, this article examines the contentious politics around the proposed mine, which mobilize multiple timescales. In this context, activists and village residents have engaged in an anticipatory politics that is influenced by past and present processes of land occupancy, environmental change, and state disinvestment, and is aimed at contesting potential dispossessions to come, making claims to resources, and securing a place in the imagined future. At the same time, state and corporate actors have engaged in their own anticipatory actions, through environmental impact assessments and other technologies of prediction that minimize, invalidate, or circumvent anti-dispossession movements. This article argues that experiences of and resistances to dispossession are mediated by the folding together of temporal frames and diverse displacements. In particular, it attends to anticipation as a key temporal mechanism through which dispossession is both enacted and contested. As such, it contributes to political ecology by combining materialist conceptions of dispossession and displacement with theorizations of anticipation and the future. Keywords : accumulation by dispossession, anticipatory politics, mining, Senegal
Highlights
One day in March 2016, Joseph2 explained his opposition to the Niafarang Project, a proposed heavy mineral sands (HMS) mine in the Casamance region of Senegal
I have traced the contours of an anticipatory politics of dispossession, showing how these politics build upon histories and present experiences of other forms of displacement
Resistance to the mining project was largely effective for a number of years, due to a widespread mobilization of people anticipating future damage, connecting with supportive actors at multiple scales, and making strategic investments in and demands for the future
Summary
One day in March 2016, Joseph explained his opposition to the Niafarang Project, a proposed heavy mineral sands (HMS) mine in the Casamance region of Senegal. The mining corporation, and local mining supporters attempted to enact a project that would certainly dispossess a small number of people of their land, activists and many local opponents predicted much wider dispossession through the mine's attendant and unplanned environmental effects They feared that this potential future outcome – serving capital, albeit indirectly – would build upon and deepen historical and contemporary forms of non-capitalist displacement. Following a review of the literatures on accumulation by dispossession and on anticipation, I trace in this article how anticipatory politics were used both to advance the proposed Niafarang Project and to disrupt it, in hopes of preventing the potential dispossession of land and resources These diverse anticipatory politics aimed at securing beneficial future outcomes intersect with past and present experiences of marginalization, exploitation, and displacement. Beyond the specificities of the Niafarang Project itself, I show that dispossession is an ongoing and contested process, which incorporates multiple temporalities and conflicting motivations of different groups of people
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