“Our Villages are Destroyed by Extracting Companies”: Ways of Defending Indigenous Rights

The present thesis shows the role of indigenous peoples facing the real menace from the extractive industries. All around the world, indigenous peoples are fighting not only with particular productions and enterprises but rather with the ‘extractivist’ world system as a whole. The present research takes to its aim an investigation of how indigenous communities in Russia are trying to defend their rights, both successfully and not. The problems with resource extraction are quite common in the whole country, especially in Siberia and the Far North. In this research I am to concentrate on two conflict zones: North part of Komi Republic (native population — Izhma Komi people) where there is an oil extraction, and South part of Kemerovo Region (native population — Shor people) where coal extraction made people move away. The comparison of two different cases helps to find different strategies of defending indigenous rights, and then, to frame them within a broader field of social movements.