May 30, 2018

International Politics and Conflict Resolution

Paula Duarte Lopes

The diffusion of power in global governance has increased the prominence of multinational corporations (MNCs) in international politics and International Relations (IR). This phenomenon has been investigated mostly at global macro policy level of analysis. Few empirically grounded studies have tried to understand how MNCs affect the daily lives of populations. This thesis contributes to respond to this lack of knowledge about the increasing involvement of corporations in governance. It is the result of an extensive empirical inquiry on the Brazilian mining MNC Vale S.A.'s operations in different host states/headquarter in contexts of formal peace: Brazil, Canada and Mozambique. Based on the articulation among the theoretical-conceptual frameworks of International Political Economy (centered on the role of MNCs locally), Political Ecology (centered on the relation between conflict and natural resources) and Foucauldian analytical tools of discipline, biopower and governmentality, the thesis sheds light on the MNC's daily involvement in governing the lives of affected communities. The central argument advanced in this research is that MNCs involved with natural resources' extraction are central agents in the political ordering of territories in where they are established. Moreover, this governance role, despite being negotiated with the different host states, is a violent dynamic, not only in the way it is imposed, but also in its daily application in populations that have to live within or interact with the mining complexes. The everyday governance of the population affected by the MNC has two main facets: on the one hand, in the 'role of government', the corporation assumes the provision of services that would classically be states' attributions; and, on the other hand, the MNC exerts an extended political ordering through different mechanisms and technologies of government. In a context of increasing public pressure for translating the economic benefits of natural resources exploitation into population's well-being, these mechanisms and technologies of government are forms of social control of the population and of legitimation of MNC's authority. But contrary to the alleged prosperity brought by mineral abundance, with rare exceptions, the three host states fieldworks have revealed scenarios of conflict that emerge as criticism and counter-conducts of the affected population to these dynamics of violence. The similarities between the contexts are related with the increasing influence of the transnational capital, product of the adoption of neoliberal policies of increasing liberation and deregulation of investments. Therefore, the research contributes to the development of Peace Studies and to a critical thought of IR from three main axes that distinguishes it from orthodox theories: the MNCs as central actors for the understanding of international relations; the analysis of conflict from formal peace contexts; and the incorporation of the analytical purchase of everyday into the understanding of international politics.

Keywords: multinational corporation; governance; socio-environmental conflicts; mining; Vale S.A.