Mining and Competing Sovereignties in New Caledonia

Abstract

Mining, especially nickel mining, has a long history in New Caledonia and cannot be separated from the trajectory of this territory as a settler colony. However, the construction of mining as a political stake and resource in the New Caledonian public arenas has come surprisingly late, only emerging explicitly in the 1990s as pro‐independence parties pushed the issue to the fore in their negotiations with the French state and anti‐independence parties. Nickel mining and processing became part of the claim for sovereignty in the form of a ‘resource nationalism’ discourse. This paper discusses the multi‐layered nature of sovereignty through the theoretical propositions of Richard Joyce on ‘competing sovereignties’ (2013) to illustrate both the complexities of a decolonization situation that has lasted for 20 years and the challenges posed to sovereignty by mining.

The disregarded weight of the ancestors: Honouring the complexities and cultural subtleties of islandscape

“…Their descendants gave rise to a way of life so tightly tied to land and cultivation that the Kanak culture is also known as the 'yam civilization' (Haudricourt, 1964). The mineral richness of the archipelago has been an appeal for European colonization since the 19 th Century, and today, more than ever, is crucial for the Indigenous Kanak people's struggle for independence (Gentilucci, 2022;Le Meur & Levacher, 2022).…”