Valuation and conflicts in the Peruvian extractive frontier: Towards a politics of value analytical framework

This article contributes to the on-going debate about how to understand extractive conflicts. What drives conflicts in areas of extraction? Do local people mobilize to reject extraction outright, or do they mobilize to secure rents and compensation from extractive projects? Political ecologists and ecological economists argue that different incommensurable languages of valuation challenge monetary value in a contest of values. Political economists disagree and argue that the majority of conflicts are about compensation, not alternative valuations. In this article, I suggest that value does indeed play a key role in extractive conflicts, but I also recognize the criticisms presented by political economy. To explore an alternative usage of value for understanding extractive conflicts, I draw on David Graebers anthropological notion of value, through which I elaborate an analytical framework of a politics of value, illustrated by three case studies of extractive conflicts in the Peruvian Andes. By analyzing conflicts in the extractive frontier as a ‘politics of value’, this article re-thinks how we understand the complicated dynamics of value and valuation in the extractive frontier and develops an analytical framework of a politics of value, to understand how conflict dynamics shape valuation, and how valuation, in turn, shapes conflict dynamics.