The moral economy of defence of territory and the political economy of extractivism in the Polochic valley, Guatemala
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Since the turn of the 21st century, sugarcane, oil palm, and nickel mining have transformed the Polochic valley lowlands in northeastern Guatemala. These industries have been met with different forms of resistance from local indigenous Q'eqchi' agrarian communities operating under the banner of “defence of territory” (DOT). In this paper, I argue that the concept of moral economy can help understand why the arrival of different (agro)extractive industries were met with different levels of resistance by Q'eqchi' communities. The key elements of the local moral economy that informs DOT in the Polochic lowlands are customary territorial practices, paternalistic class relationships, and rising livelihood expectations. The degree to which this moral economy was violated by different industries helps explain variegated responses and outcomes, particularly why sugarcane company Chabil Utzaj was met with widespread and sustained resistance that ultimately led to its decision to cease operations. This moral economy was itself shaped by previous cycles of agrarian change and continues to shape present‐day political contestation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".