Making and unmaking gold as a resource. Resistant socionatures in Maidan, Kyrgyzstan

In October 2013, around 200 protestors from the rural settlement Maidan in Kyrgyzstan clashed violently with the representatives of the exploration company as they brought in the first excavator to construct the mining infrastructure for the ‘Shambesai’ gold deposit. This paper is an attempt to understand the processes and practices that have led to this escalation and that continue to sustain Maidan's rejection of the gold mine to date. Motivated by state and corporate assertions that attribute such actions primarily to material interests, we engage this resistance to gold extractivism in sociomaterial terms trying to understand more deeply the dynamics of ordinary citizens’ activism. Based on multi-stage interdisciplinary research, we trace and reconstruct the socionatural conditions and practices that have culminated in Maidan's decade-long struggle to unmake gold as a resource on their territory. Focusing on resource materialities, their valuations and governance, we present an historico-geographical analysis of making and unmaking of a resource frontier. Against the backdrop of the extractive order that has prevailed in Kyrgyzstan over the last three decades, we understand Maidan's struggle to be a form of situated institutional experimentation for shaping meaningful and just more-than-human socionatures.