Conflicts and socio-environmental protests in Chile: Methodological reflections and results

Abstract

This paper offers methodological discussion on today’s available data on socio-environmental conflicts in Chile and presents first results based on an analysis of the Conflicts Observatory from the Centre for Social Conflicts and Cohesion Studies (COES). In the first part the article details the main database available and stress a discussion on the definition of the key terms “conflict” and “socio-environmental”. That way the paper recall that investigations play a role in giving visibility or maintaining invisible social processes. In the second part, the paper presents an ongoing research results that participate to the definition of “socio-environmental conflicts” through the study of protests. Thus the article deals with two main questions: Who are the protesters, and what are their socio-environmental demands? This text can be useful for students and researchers working on socio-environmental conflicts and dealing with a variety of data sources.