Toward extractive archipelagos

Foreign analysts often consider the Republic of Georgia’s territorial borders through geopolitical imaginations of great powers, foreign occupations and democratic reforms. However, the Georgian government’s push to decentralize and deregulate all economic sectors has also produced a new licence-based resource governance system that generates informal, yet similarly dynamic, territorial struggles. This paper considers the case of a gold and copper mining complex in southern Georgia, assessed through a range of mixed empirics collected during the summers of 2015–17. In doing so, it proposes viewing extractive industries’ political geographies as sets of embedded and often informal bordering practices. In Georgia, these borderings produce a political ‘island’ within a broader extractive ‘archipelago’: simultaneously bound from and connected to their surrounding environments, yet also linked with other similar corporate-owned extractive jurisdictions across disparate governing contexts. Such borderings produce shifting power geometries that citizens must navigate daily. Understanding mining’s diverse effects, especially in post-Soviet environments, requires connecting and contextualizing these extractive practices. The paper therefore illustrates how Georgian resource extraction offers a window onto broader shifts in corporate and state political geographies across Eurasia.