ABSTRACT
This chapter explores emergent community tensions in the context of current and prospective gold extraction in the Naryn region of Kyrgyzstan. Writing against institutional discourses that focus on apparently ‘obstructive’ community opposition to extractive industries or that foreground the actions of criminal and self-interested individuals, I highlight the complexity of community interests as these relate to prior experiences of artisanal mining in a context of profound economic dislocation. Extraction of in/formal gold brings out tensions among the local population, feeds on the desires to improve their livelihoods and further disrupts some local connections and ties between families and villages. These tensions and disparities, I argue, despite being localized in these rural, mountainous communities in Naryn, are the results of neoliberal extraction projects set loose in the country in the last three decades. A detailed focus on the local needs and economic situation of various groups of people involved in protests about a small mining site in Kum-Bel reveals that the local community is not a homogenous entity, and that ideas of justice that people support around mining are more complex than those presented by the government and media. A further stratification of the population means that various groups of people face different and manifold challenges and their responses to legal/illegal mining are a result of diverging livelihood strategies that they employ. The irony is that these diverging strategies can be part of neoliberal projects of extraction and exploitation of people and land. Tensions around gold mining in Naryn, thus, should be understood as part of the entanglement of at least three extraction projects: gold, money and livestock.
