Entre action collective et mouvement social : L'action de protestation Conga dans la Région de Cajamarca, au Pérou, de 1990 à 2015

Although Peru is economically one of the most stable countries in Latin America, many of its regions are still in extreme poverty. This is the result of structural inequalities in access to basic services such as education and health, low levels of education and high rate of unemployment. In this context, the mining sector plays a central role in the productive structure of the country. In 2018, its participation to the national GDP was 8.8% and represented 58.9% of the exportable supply (statistics from the Ministry of Mines and Energy and the Peruvian Reserve Bank). Although mining companies generate significant resources for the regions, these benefits are not perceived by the local population, which often leads to conflict. As a result, in Peru, more than 50% of social conflicts are of a socio-environmental nature, linked in particular to the extractive practices of mining companies.Social movements, considered as a specific collective action, are important because they are a means to achieve social changes. They push the state and the political and economic elites to take into consideration the demands of civil society actors. In 2011, the Conga protest action began in the Cajamarca region of northern Peru when the environmental impact study of the mining project led by the Yanacocha company was approved by the government. Two governments were directly affected by this action: that of Alan García Pérez (in the last phase of his second term, 2006-2011) and that of Ollanta Humala Tasso (2011-2016). It is under this last government that the mechanisms and processes of protest to be analyzed have been the most numerous.This thesis aims to determine if the Conga protest action falls within the scope of the concept of ‘social movement’. In this perspective, we used the approach of the French sociologist Alain Touraine and the one of North American schools, such as the theory of ‘resource mobilization’, ‘political opportunities structures’, and ‘framing processes’. The methodology chosen for this research is that of the case study, particularly suitable for exploratory and/or comprehensive approaches. It allowed us to piece together the main building blocks of the Conga protest action and their interrelationships. We have adopted an approach that is both retrospective and diachronic, which aims to better understand all the internal but also external factors that have had an impact on the origin, development, change of scale, waning influence and the stop the protest action. The analysis covers elements such as the centralism of national policies, a generally absent and inefficient State, the lack of organization of the protest, the difficulty in defining a collective identity among the mobilized actors, the damage generated by the large- scale mining, their impacts on the symbolic universe of local populations, or even the different ways in which water is valued.Empirically, we have worked with primary and secondary data, including 31 in-depth interviews with actors closely involved in the Conga protest action, whether for or against the mining project. To analyze these discourses, we used the "Atlas Ti" software, which made it possible to order and systematize qualitative data.In the end, the research concludes that the Conga protest action cannot be considered as a social movement, at least under the criteria of analysis developed by Alain Touraine.

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