Stamina and the Embodiment of Expertise: Resources of Transnational Activism to Counter Corporate Slow Violence

Plüss, Hannah (2023). Stamina and the Embodiment of Expertise: Resources of Transnational Activism to Counter Corporate Slow Violence (Submitted). Zeitschrift für Friedens- und Konfliktforschung Springer

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Analyses from political ecology and other disciplines show on the one hand how projects of hydroelectric power production can lead to situations of corporate slow violence. On the other hand, contributions of the same disciplines analyse how transnational activism can change shape, course, and power structures in environmental conflicts.
My contribution brings together these debates, which have so far been conducted separately, by analysing the conflict around a run-of-the-river hydroelectric powerplant in rural Ecuador. The powerplant has been backed by a legitimizing discourse of contributing to sustainable non-carbon-based solutions to global climate change. Despite this good image, the company ignored the national legislation and the knowledge of the local population about their river, as well as their needs, and thus involved them in a situation of corporate slow violence. Parts of the community subsequently joined with activists from the U.S. and formed an NGO to convert the physical protest-dominated resistance strategy into one of scientific and legal activism.
My analysis shows how this case of corporate slow violence was confronted by these activists mobilizing a variety of resources, among them two that are not taken into account in the pertinent literature so far, namely the necessary time and stamina to cope with the violence, and the use of the embodiment of expertise of the white colonialist other as a strategic tool to change power structures in the region.

Item Type:	Journal Article (Original Article)
Division/Institute:	06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Art and Cultural Studies > Institute of Musicology
UniBE Contributor:	Plüss Quintanilla Fernández, Hannah
Subjects:	300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology > 360 Social problems & social services
ISSN:	2524-6976
Publisher:	Springer
Language:	English
Submitter:	Hannah Plüss Quintanilla Fernández
Date Deposited:	07 Jul 2023 09:37
Last Modified:	07 Jul 2023 09:37
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/184541