Dead Animals, Frozen Grass and People on the Move: Neoliberal Encompassment and Abandonment in Mongolia.

Keywords: climate change, inequality, neoliberalism, abandonment
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 10

Abstract

In recent years Mongolia experienced a series of prolonged natural disasters, including ‘dzuds’-hot summers followed by severe winters with heavy snow, winds and lower-than-normal temperatures. With temperatures dropping to -55C/-67F, 402,300 livestock died nationwide in Mongolia in 2020/2021 devastating livelihoods of nomadic herder families across vast grasslands of Mongolia.

Against the background of animal corpses scattered across Mongolian pastures and impoverished herders displaced and moving across the country to look for unregulated work in the growing shantytowns outside Ulaanbaatar (hosting about 700,000 internally displaced people), Mongolia has been experiencing a mining boom with its neoliberal promise to ‘drag' its agrarian society into the 'modern age’. Economic, environmental, and social costs of development based on commodity exports, including one of the largest displacements of people in its history, remain, largely, excluded from calculations by the national government, foreign investors, and multinational companies.

This paper draws upon the concepts of neoliberal abandonment and agnotology to interrogate how continuums of slow decay of nomadic herders, their animals, grasslands, and entire ecosystems pass between and through each other within the context of neoliberal state/capital entanglements.

By drawing upon a series of interviews with displaced residents of semi-legal ‘ger’ settlements on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar conducted in 2016 and 2018, it explores the processes of neoliberal encompassment of the savaged body of Nature and of expendable human bodies as resources to be consumed and exploited; and of neoliberal abandonment of viciously neglected human and non-human others, whose life is earmarked as lying outside market value.