2026/05/20 by Raphaëlle Chevrillon-Guibert, Mohamed Salah Abdelrahman · 1 voice
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Engineering · Social Sciences · #Mining and Resource Management #Natural Resources and Economic Development #Water Governance and Infrastructure
paper · doi:10.1111/area.70124
openalex publication_date 2026/05/20 · openalex created_date 2026/05/22 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
ABSTRACT This article examines how blockades of extractive infrastructure operate as political acts of resistance and territorial reappropriation in the context of authoritarian extractive governance. Focusing on Sudan and Morocco, it explores how marginalised actors in mining peripheries use targeted disruptions—of roads, permits, tax systems or flows—to contest exclusion, negotiate visibility and assert claims to sovereignty and redistribution. While extractivism is often studied through its environmental or economic impacts, less attention has been paid to blockades as spatial and political interventions. This paper addresses that gap by analysing blockades not as spontaneous interruptions but as strategic, localised practices embedded in specific socio‐political contexts. It engages with scholarship on logistical disruption, environmental resistance, and informal governance and contributes to debates on infrastructure as a site of contested authority. Drawing on fieldwork in Sawarda and Abidiya (Sudan) and Jerada and the Midelt basin (Morocco), we ask: how do local communities politicise extractive infrastructure? How do blocking practices reveal the differentiated presence of the state in authoritarian contexts, and what do they tell us about the governance of resource flows? We argue that in both cases—despite differing regimes and mining economies—blockades function as tools of ‘conflictual territorialization’. In Sudan, they challenge securitised gold infrastructures and lead to tangible institutional shifts. In Morocco, they disrupt informal circuits and contest access to rents, permits and recognition. In both settings, extractive infrastructure becomes a key site through which claims to justice and autonomy are articulated from the margins. Ultimately, the article shows how blockades reveal, contest and reconfigure the extractive order in North African peripheries, where authoritarian governance and informal practices intersect. They highlight the political centrality of logistical infrastructures in contemporary extractivism and the capacity of peripheral actors to reshape power relations from below.