Building a Mineral Nation? The Oyu Tolgoi Copper-Gold Mine and Contested Infrastructure Development in Mongolia

This dissertation investigates mining as a contested nation-building project through the development of mining-related infrastructure for the Oyu Tolgoi copper-gold mine, located in Mongolia’s South Gobi province. Oyu Tolgoi is expected to contribute over 30 percent of Mongolia’s GDP in the coming decades and has become a symbol of the promise of national development through mineral extraction. At the same time, the material effects of mining-related infrastructure challenge these promises of nation-building. I argue that controversies over Oyu Tolgoi provide a lens onto the complexities of mining as a nation-building project, revealing how the state both facilitates and inhibits mining and how people living in mining-affected areas perceive the impacts of mining on their livelihoods, futures, and belonging to the nation. Specifically, I examine how Oyu Tolgoi and its parent corporations contribute to rebuilding Mongolia as a ‘mineral nation;’ how the privatization of water resource access creates new visions of the nation at the cost of pre-existing visions; how road dust brings local residents into intimate contact with contradictions of mining as a nation-building project; and how fiction can reveal alternative understandings of nature, mining, and nation. At the core of contestations over infrastructure development are questions of who has the power to define the direction of the nation, how the materiality of mining channels the possibilities of local and national development, and what are the costs to both local livelihoods and the nation. By focusing attention on mining-related infrastructure, this dissertation contributes to calls for more research on how infrastructure enables, channels, and delimits future possibilities of not only governance and territory, but also, I argue the nation.