On May 11th, the UNESCO Chair in Philosophy for Peace, the Inter-University Institute for Social Development and Peace of the Universitat Jaume I, and the Iberian Mining Observatory (MINOB) organised a seminar on extractivist violence in which the Observatory's project and website were publicly presented.
Kristina Sehlin MacNeil, co-director of the Sami Studies Centre at Umeå University in Sweden, coined the concept of 'extractivist violence' to better understand the forms of violence directed against nature or against people and caused by extractive activities and, in particular, mining.
These forms of direct, structural or cultural violence include soil, water and air pollution, health impacts, threats, corruption or practices of social engineering or 'soft counterinsurgency', and are precisely what MINOB seeks to document and expose.
The seminar held in Castelló was also attended by Gabriel Castañares, Director General of Leveraging Policies for the Fulfilment of the 2030 Agenda of the Ministry of Social Rights and the 2030 Agenda, which has supported the creation of MINOB, as well as representatives of different groups and platforms who, together with students of the Master's Degree in International Peace, Conflict and Development Studies, have prepared the first cases available on the Observatory's website.