Following the iron ore trails of India for a global epistemology of extractive capital

Abstract

This thesis develops a global epistemology of Extractive Capital (EC), conceptualised as a place-specific, energy and emissions intensive regime of accumulation sustained through geological continuity, infrastructural lock-ins, extraction costs, and political arrangements. It argues that EC can only be adequately known from the extraction site outward, tracing the commodity chain from the village to the corridor to the global market, and that conventional governance frameworks constructed from the commodity chain inward systematically misrepresent the scale, distribution, and intergenerational consequences of extraction.

Focusing on iron ore across India's six-state iron ore belt, the study draws on 28,000 kilometres of field travel, 248 mine-site scans, and community engagement mapping 2,322 extraction-affected villages. Extractive Sensemaking (ESM) frames the analysis, extending organisational sensemaking to account for geological finitude, spatial displacement of consequences, and temporal dislocation, explaining why epistemic silences surrounding extraction persist across successive governance regimes.

A four-phase methodology integrating archival excavation, geospatial diagnostics, community ethnography, and reflexive interviewing triangulates 900 archival records, satellite imagery, and vernacular testimony. Gioia-style coding of 112 interviews and 86 conversations and group discussions produces four aggregate dimensions: Political Licence to Operate, Entropic Impact, Sociology of Value, and Path Dependence Continuity. These reveal how legitimacy is brokered, how extraction degrades socio-ecological systems, how value is differentially assigned across the commodity chain, and how infrastructural and governance routines lock in high-impact trajectories.

The thesis demonstrates that governance breakdown in extractive industries is constitutive rather than correctable. Counter-archives and a transferable framework address the structural condition at the heart of extractive governance, namely the systematic privileging of commodity-chain over site-level knowledge, for scholars and practitioners in corporate governance, risk management, and responsible business wherever political licence remains actively contested.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Samarendra Das: orcid.org/0000-0001-8511-6480

ORCID for Martin Enilov: orcid.org/0000-0002-7671-6975

ORCID for Tapas Mishra: orcid.org/0000-0002-6902-2326

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