The Juridification of Resource Conflicts
The Juridification of Resource Conflicts is a British Academy-funded research project which explores the uses of the jural by a range of actors in Central America and Mexico to advance their views about development and natural resource governance in the context of violent conflict over subsoil resources (specifically minerals) and water. The project spans the fields of political anthropology, socio-legal studies and political ecology. The Juridification of Resource Conflicts has researched mining projects in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Mexico where equitable and sustainable development is hindered by extremely high levels of inequality, violence and impunity. Environmental politics involves not only the resource-rich territories that provide a habitat and/or livelihood for local populations, but also a plurality of incommensurable moralities, forms of knowledge and ontologies vis-à-vis the environment, natural resources, extraction, rights, sovereignty and development. Disputes over natural resources and their management have increasingly assumed a law-like shape and have been channelled through legal and quasi-legal arenas, such as civil and criminal courts, arbitration tribunals, popular tribunals, consultations emulating legally-binding plebiscites, grassroots forms of lawmaking, and international human rights institutions. As such, this project explores the development of juridification, that is, the legal framing of resource conflicts. A key