Current Sociology

Please welcome our Sociologist of the Month for August 2024, Alexander Dunlap (University of Oslo, Norway). His article for Current Sociology Weaponizing people in environmental conflicts: Capturing ‘hearts’, ‘minds’, and manufacturing ‘volunteers’ for extractive development is Open Access.

Alexander Dunlap

Could you please tell us about yourself? How did you come to your field of study?

A. Dunlap: As a child, the adults and their institutions seemed painfully, even if I did not know the word then, hypocritical and, in a word, wrong. I did not learn how to read at my level until sometime between 18-20, but I strictly learned how to read to see where this “system” came from (e.g. the state, liberal capitalism), why the police would not stop harassing me skateboarding (and beyond) and why I was stuck working ‘shit jobs’. My motivation to learn how to read was to understanding the institutions and technologies of political terror. In so many words, this is where my studies began and continue to pursue today.

What prompted you to research the area of your article, “Weaponizing people in environmental conflicts: Capturing ‘hearts’, ‘minds’, and manufacturing ‘volunteers’ for extractive development”?

A. Dunlap: It was the original call for Monograph issue papers that prompted me to write, but more specifically the desire to demonstrate how people are implicitly or directly volunteering to serve powers and interest they may not be entirely aware of. My case is a bit different than the conventional war, conflict or sites of genocide that are in the special issue, and that is the point: documenting the low-intensity conflicts and struggles the desecrate environments, plunder resources and fuel extractive capitalism. Just because there are not tanks, standing militaries or militarized police does not mean technologies of political control or “stabilization” are not inconstant play to facilitate capitalist (or statist) political economy.

What do you see as the key findings of your article?

A. Dunlap: People are being weaponized in environmental conflicts through jobs, social development, infrastructure, agriculture and, most of all, medical clinics. Companies, and governments, are intervening into the social fabrics in communities and neighborhoods to divide and conquer them to, in this case, grab water to mine gold, silver, copper and other metals to fuel extractive capitalism and a modernist progress that has proved detrimental to social ecologies.

What are the wider social implications of your research in the current social climate? How do you think things will change in the future?

A. Dunlap: The goal in this article, as in my other works, is to have environmental, climate and land defense struggles to understand how states and companies are approaching population management and land control. This is to create general public awareness of the insidious technologies of political control, leveraging (the manufactured conditions of) poverty to get people to sell themselves, their cultures, rivers, mountains and fields out to extractivism—the ideology of plunder that fuels states and capitalism. This work seeks to provide knowledge of how conflicts are managed so people can make more informed choices on how to protect themselves and organize.

Do you have any links to images, documents or other pieces of research which build on or add to the article? Or a suggested reading list?

A. Dunlap: Yes, I have an enormous amount of articles, check my Research Gate and in the interest of space, maybe the best recommendation is my new book, This System is Killing Us: Land Grabbing, the Green Economy and Ecological Conflict by Pluto Press. It is a 10-year review of my work in ecological conflicts.