Contested knowledge S pace and risk of modernity: A Case study of a local struggle against gold mining in Loei Province

Abstract

This qualitative research aimed to explore the contested space of knowledge and the risk of modernity through the struggles of communities around a gold mine in Loei province in northeastern Thailand and to examine the contested knowledge on modernity, a transition of the risk of modernity to social risk, and a struggle of a community movement in the face of social risk. The research has generated three findings. First, negotiation for the meaning of modernity was manifested a form of natural resource governance. In terms of the knowledge space on risk, the research has shown that the villagers' struggles revealed contestation of knowledge on modernity whereby the term does not refer to development, prosperity, or improved quality of life as offered by the state and the capitalists to the villagers as a commodity of hope. Modernity is a form of complex risk taking the forms of physical, violence-based, and legal risks. The risk of modernity also excluded the villagers from resource governance. Second, a legal battle involved the risk of modernity was a process in which the villagers' movement were depoliticized. The findings show that the lawsuits turned the villagers' movement aiming to resolve conflicts with political means into a movement forced to use legal means. The movement in the name of their community was turned into a struggle of each individual in the court space, which has created difficulties and fear that discouraged the villagers from staying with the movement. These lawsuits thus aimed to silence them and eventually counter attack the villagers' struggles. The risk of modernity in this context had a double meaning. That is, in the first meaning, the risk of modernity resulted from the impacts of the physical space of the mine. In the second meaning, the risk of modernity occurred in a legal space. Third, the community resistance opened a third space of the assemblage of knowledge. The research has shown that the conditions marred with ambiguity, lack of clarity, vagueness created by the contestation in the risk of modernity became a condition that the state and the capitalists used to access natural resources. The villagers' struggle took place in order to stop these elements of ambiguity. If the villagers had submitted to this ambiguity, they would have been at a disadvantage. They thus decided not to submit to the dominant set of knowledge and struggled in the movement to open a new space of knowledge whereby different sets of knowledge contested freely and became assembled and formed a new set of knowledge. The space also changed power relations which prevented the villagers from falling complacent with their own prior knowledge, knowledge from the NGOs, and knowledge from the state and capitalists. The space helped the villagers choose the sets of knowledge that most benefit them.