Professor Claire Blencowe Awarded Prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant to study the role of religion in power struggles over mining

Official abstract from the research grant:

Religious Authority in Extractive Industry Struggles

RAIDS aims to establish that religion is a crucial terrain of authority that contributes to determining (un)equal and (un)just outcomes in extractive industry struggles. Religious authority has been largely overlooked in the scholarship on extraction. I suggest this is because the Eurocentric ‘secularisation thesis’ continues to limit the sociological imagination such that religious authority is only seen as relevant to the past, traditional’ societies, or ‘extremist’ groups, despite extensive evidence of the enduring political importance of religion. Religion is widely recognised as an important aspect of Indigenous relations with land, but the contemporary role of religion in securing (and thus also challenging) interests of big businesses and geopolitically dominant states is scarcely acknowledged. Thus, religion has not been properly understood as a relevant terrain of authority. RAIDS will show that religious authority is both a ‘weapon of the weak’ and a weapon of the most powerful interests in contemporary extractive industry struggles. By identifying and analysing the significance of religious authority within eight specific mining disputes located in India, Indonesia, Brazil and the USA (spanning multiple faiths) and theorising the role of religious authority in extractive industry struggles in general, the project will open new ways for scholars and activists to understand and challenge inequalities and injustice.

RAIDS builds on my innovative research on the role of religion in the expansion of extractive industries in 18th-19th C British Empire by investigating contemporary phenomena and multiple faiths. It breaks new ground in decolonial-feminist participatory research, offering new ways to centre voices and in-sights of communities who confront extractive industries on the ground. It addresses urgent questions about power and justice within land and labour disputes that are intensifying in the context of climate catastrophe and post-carbon transition.