Paper short abstract:

Mining activity in Cerro de Pasco, Peru has marked the Andean landscape with contamination and ruins. This study explores the role that industrialisation has had in historically articulating insecurity as affect. It also aims to emphasise the role that affect has in provoking local political action.

Paper long abstract:

In a town located at 4,330 m.a.m.s.l. in the Peruvian Andes, urban destruction provoked by mining activity has become the everyday reality. The mining enterprise has gained industrial proportions since the beginning of 20th century when the North-American Copper corporation purchased the small-scale, local mines.

In the last 50 years, tunnel mining has been supplemented with open-pit exploitation in the middle of the urbanization. The open-pit expansion has been done at the expense of gradual forced displacement and the destruction of some of the oldest historical neighbourhoods in Cerro de Pasco.

Despite being aware of the negative effects of mining activity, few locals engage in political resistance: most remain indifferent or prefer to abandon the place. The mining company's development decisions, from which most locals are excluded, have shaped the urban landscape into one of ruins and contamination.

Nevertheless, for some locals, the personal trauma of displacement becomes a source of political activism. This paper aims to explore the role that the charged affect felt during the experience of forced displacement has in forging local political identities (Thrift 2007).

The paper also focuses on the historical articulation of the affect of insecurity as a result of the transformations in urban space and infrastructure across the political-historical context. These urban transformations reciprocally affect the ways locals have engaged or dis-engaged with their surroundings and the political governance.