Gold in crisis

The GOLDCRISIS research project takes gold as the lens to examine the nexus of social upheaval, environmental degradation and transnational crime in the borderlands of the northern Amazon (Venezuela and Suriname). The aim of the project is to explain how Amazonian gold dynamics drive contemporary global forms of social and environmental crisis. Building on anthropological scholarship and the anthropology of resources, the project examines mobility, governance and natural resources in conjunction to understand socio-environmental crisis. The project empirically connects local processes of mining and commerce to new forms of global exploitation of people and the environment. In doing so, GOLDCRISIS provides empirical evidence of environmental threats and economic crimes generated by gold mining, which has recently increased due to the rapid mechanisation of extractive technology and the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela. This project started in 2019 and needs funding to be developed fully.