Resisting mining in Ireland: The social engineering and colonial logics of green extractivism

As the extractive frontier expands out into peripheralised parts of Europe, branded as critical for the green transition, communities are resisting. Research on resistance to this extractivism has ballooned in recent years. I explore the resistance movement to a gold mining proposal for the Sperrin Mountains, North of Ireland, building on feminist and decolonial scholarship which has conceptually widened extractivism from a physical removal of resources to be understood as a logic, worldview, a way of relating in the world rooted in coloniality and specific power relations. This article contributes to discussions on the impacts of green transitions globally and on marginalised communities within Europe, particularly how these dynamics play out in the North of Ireland with a unique colonial and post-conflict setting. Drawing on a 5-year activist research project, I detail how extractive logics are manifesting in the Sperrins. These logics appear in colonial constructions of place, embodied and emotional slow violence and through social engineering of extraction. I extend critical approaches to the study of green extractivism through a detailed empirical case, bringing new insights to understandings of the social engineering of extraction, through counterinsurgency and a social licence to operate. In this context resistance to new extractivist incursions are understood as part of longer histories of resistance to oppression. I argue that in challenging these extractive logics, the resistance movement is ‘Making Relatives’ and transforming relations with the human and more-than-human world and pointing to post-extractive futures.