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Article

French

ID: <

10670/1.9zpan0

>

Where these data come from
Kanake sovereignty (s) in the Nickel Country (New Caledonia): Two policy environmentals under discussion

Abstract

The main struggle waged by the Kanaks in New Caledonia since the second half of the 1970s has been that of emancipation from French tutelage to found an independent nation, with a non-Kanak population whose boundaries have been the subject of bitter negotiations in the various political agreements that have punctuated the decolonization of the country. From the 1980s onwards, the pro-independence movement also campaigned for control of the nickel resource, via a semi-public shareholding in companies, so that mining would benefit the territory and break with the logic of the assisted economy that characterizes it. However, when a transnational company was set up in the south, an indigenous mobilization drew attention to the fact that it was deploying an environmentalist critique of mining activity while demanding a right to control its exploitation, both at the local level and for the Kanak group. This article questions the meaning of this struggle. Refusing the essentialist interpretation of a symbiosis of indigenous peoples with nature, necessarily in struggle against extractivism (which Kanak nationalism denies), it rather considers the argument from the angle of a quest for political representation of the ethnic group. It then examines the political conditions of the actualization of ethnic cleavages in this form, in order to better underline that the defense of the environment is above all, for all Kanaks, a local matter.

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