There is more than the emblematic stop-the-mine type: Reply to Martinez-Alier et al on environmental justice conflicts

Abstract

Stop-the-mine contention is a notorious type of environmental justice conflict. One central argument in Orihuela et al. (2022) is that a significantly more prevalent category in Peru is better-deal or co-existence conflict, a collection of diverse and shifting cases of accommodation-within-mobilization. The third big environmental justice conflict type is when affected communities do not mobilize, which by definition goes mostly under the radar of justice activists, bureaucrats and researchers. We adjust a summary table of the Peru case, showing that the claim that stop-the-mine conflicts are a minority holds when considering as a conflict universe the total of mines facing mobilization only, what Martinez-Alier et al. (2022) consider the right denominator for estimating a “successful resistance ratio”. However, we underscore that both (a) excluding mines without contentious mobilization from the environmental conflict discussion and (b) collapsing independent cases of political contention against a mine into a one-mine-means-one-conflict categorical variable lead to fairly partial readings of the political economy of environmental justice. In addition, we identify in our colleagues’ reply troublesome claims regarding the conceptualization of environmental conflicts and a handful of misrepresentations of our original paper.