PhD graduate M. Omar Faruque published an article in the Asian Journal of Political Science. The piece analyzes the development of local community resistance to mining in Bangladesh. Faruque studied the Phubari movement and found that its success in opposing mining was largely because the activists worked with local communities and framed their action in a way that resonated with the local culture.
M. Omar Faruque will receive his PhD in 2019. He successfully defended his dissertation entitled, Mining Capitalism and Contentious Politics in Bangladesh this January.
We have posted the citation and the abstract of the article below. The full text is available through the University of Toronto library portal here.
M. Omar Faruque (2018) Mining and subaltern politics: political struggle against neoliberal development in Bangladesh, Asian Journal of Political Science, 26:1, 65-86:
Drawing on social movement scholarship, this paper analyses subaltern struggles against a multinational mining company. The Phulbari coal mine is the centre of contention between the mining company and local/national activists. Local concerns about the dispossession of lands and livelihoods and environmental destruction have been merged with a Leftist political agenda on the growing vulnerability of the state and national sovereignty in the Global South. A close examination of the movement's discourses suggests that a broader political struggle against resource plunder and energy imperialism has been strengthened by local community resistance to an environmentally destructive coal mine. Based on in-depth qualitative interviews, I analyse how activists have created new meanings of the conflict to confront and delegitimize hegemonic discourses of capitalist development and modernity.