Insurgent infrastructures: bottom-up infrastructure-building in gold-mining regions in Colombia and Suriname

Critical analyses of infrastructural violence have mostly approached infrastructure as a top-down imposition that allows markets and state governments to expand inflicts suffering on local populations. Here we take our analytical starting point different kind harm, namely the one comes not from building environment, but leaving it unbuilt. From this vantage point, are foremost interested in forms socio-spatial organization emerge regions political abandonment. Drawing fieldwork gold-mining Colombia Suriname, show resource frontiers where people criticize for being absent, informal mining stakeholders create their own infrastructures provide them with means gain legitimacy protest social exclusion. While these ‘insurgent infrastructures’ place outside legal framework, they symbolic material conditions appear.