National resources, resistance & the afterlives of NIEO in Bangladesh

Over the last two decades in Bangladesh, a well-organised resistance to coal mining in the northwest, and to onshore and offshore gas exploration, has been animated by concerns over dispossession of land, and plans to export much of the coal and gas to be extracted in the name of financial viability. As such, these movements might be read as resistance to ‘extractivism’ in a ‘literal sense’. In scholarship on resistance to resource extraction in Bangladesh, significant attention has been given to the tensions that appear to arise between ‘resource nationalist’ opposition to foreign-owned or export-oriented extractive operations, and (some) supposed resource nationalists’ accommodation of fossil fuel extraction in the name of energy sovereignty and development. In this paper, I argue that this apparent tension in understanding resistance to ‘extractivism’ dissolves when the New International Economic Order (NIEO) – which centred on attempts to assert permanent sovereignty over natural resources and empower post-colonial states to negotiate with extractive corporations – is foregrounded. In Bangladesh, sovereignty over natural resources and the primacy of domestic courts in disputes over resource extraction is frequently enacted, much to the displeasure of international extractive industry corporations. Focusing on attempts to enact the spirit of NIEO by Bangladeshi courts, and arbitrators locking horns with extractive industry corporations, I suggest that ‘resource nationalist’ mobilization against unjust forms of resource extraction can at times be understood as resistance to the international legal architecture which frames extractive corporations’ relationships with post-colonial states, rather than to extractivism in the ‘literal sense’.