Ambiguities and Potentialities of Social Sciences in the Peruvian Mining Context

This article will show the tensions, ambiguities and potentialities faced by social scientists in a situation of conflict around extractive industries in Peru. The first section provides background information on extractive politics in Peru, associated with growing social tensions and increasing criminalization of social protest. Within this general scenario, a particular case will be presented, the Conga mining conflict, an outstanding example of major challenges posed by the social response to extractive policies. The second section addresses the roles played by social sciences in this context, with a focus on the increasing involvement of social scientists as conflict analysts and solvers. We will also argue the near-impossibility of intellectual neutrality while approaching conflicts spurred by large-scale mining and that the peril of ambiguity looms over the production of knowledge on the social roots and contexts of these conflicts. The third and final section deals with the potentialities of engaged research. We will discuss the benefits of an “amphibious” positioning between Academy and broader civil society (Svampa, 2008), show the importance of confronting the “politics of resignation” (Benson and Kirsch, 2010) and underline the importance of drawing attention to the “sociology of emergences” (De Sousa Santos, 2011) with full consideration of alternatives as critical means to reconcile a broad diversity of epistemologies.