Alero Akporiaye - May 20 - Company-Community Conflict in the Extractive Sector

Alero Akporiaye, RISD History, Philosophy and the Social Sciences (HPSS) Department
“When Communities Attack: Company-Community Conflict in the Extractive Sector”

Monday, May 20
2:00-3:00
041 Haldeman

Description: While extractive sector multinational corporations (MNCs) can generate positive benefits such as employment and technological and managerial transfers in host countries, their operations can also yield negative externalities. Extractive operations have proximate environmental impacts that have long lasting effects that pollute air, water, and land, and may also produce undesirable socioeconomic conditions that end up in a vicious cycle of perpetual inequalities. Such social and environmental upheaval are often sited in producing communities that host MNC operations and can generate grievances in these communities. These grievances left unaddressed can provoke conflict that target firms with protest and attacks. In this paper, we use a new dataset on natural resources and civil conflict to investigate the relationship between negative externalities from extractive operations leads to material attacks against firms. We look at six specific case studies that include El Salvador, Guatemala, Liberia, Nicaragua, Sierra Leone, and The Philippines. Spatial location and time play crucial role in our analysis.

https://www.risd.edu/people/alero-akporiaye/

Faculty host: D.G. Webster

Sponsored by the Environmental Studies Program and the Arthur L. Irving institute for Energy and Society

Free and open to the public.