ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the politics of mining contestation in Kyrgyzstan from 1998 to 2015, beginning with community and activist responses to a 1998 cyanide spill at the Kumtor gold mine. It explores two characteristics of this shifting shape of mining contestation. First is the role of images — photographs, satellite images, videos, films — in capturing and creating public sentiment and as rhetorical devices. Second, anti-mining activist notions and claims of justice have shifted over time, often in response to images of mining and changing public imaginings of nature. Both the contestation characteristics of gold mining politics in Kyrgyzstan — images and justice claims — change and interact over time and space. Just in the last few years, images of mining rock waste on glaciers in the Ak Shirak range have fundamentally shaped the ways people in Kyrgyzstan imagine the future, talk about threats to the nation.
