Resistance, rootedness and mining protest in Phulbari

This thesis is concerned with the dynamics and social morphology of resistance to mining in Bangladesh. Using the case of on-going resistance to a government supported open-pit coal mine project proposed by Asia Energy Corporations in Phulbari, Northwest Bangladesh, it considers the resistance within a particular context while investigating how the ideas held by various groups intersect and conflict in developing networks of resistance. Through ethnographic engagement in a particular ‘community’, as well as with the activism at the national level, the research attempts to explore how and to what extent the connection and disjuncture of observations and experiences of particular groups shape the resistance movement. The aims of this thesis are two fold. Firstly it expands on anthropological accounts of social movements’ rootedness in patterns of daily life. As such I examine how local resistance to mining initiatives emerges in specific contexts and around such located concerns that often remain unexpressed in the public discourse of protests. I show how resistance builds around anxieties of losing ‘home’ and accompanying rights and claims. Secondly, this research contributes to the anthropological analysis of ‘connection’ and ‘network’ in this ‘global’ era. Through an ethnographic study of the resistance movement against mining I show how the movement’s network is not a smooth integration of groups and actors; tension and ambiguity is central to it. I look at the ways in which friction of disparate ideas attached to different level of analysis, i.e. ‘local’, ‘national’ and ‘universal’, pave way for the formation of tentative alliances as the differential observations come to fit into the common discourses of protest.