Counter-hegemonic resistance on the extractive frontier in Peru: exploring the legal-political nexus

This article examines how power is permanently contested in the extractive frontier, forcing extractive investments to re-accommodate or to retreat. Using the Chuschi mining conflict as a case study, it argues that the anti-mining mobilization appropriated different rights discourses that span different historical blocs to carve out counter-hegemonic spaces of resistance that reproduce a political subjectivity, which is not subsumed by extractivism, to contest power on the extractive frontier. Moreover, it shows that the strategic use of law does not have to ultimately sustain the status quo of neoliberal power but is part of re-imagining a different state and society.