Christian Sorace & David Sneath, Steppe Transitions, NLR 159, May–June 2026
Mongolia’s diverse ecology was the site of revolutionary transformations in the twentieth century, when the principal source of wealth—the livestock herd—was sequentially the basis of feudal class, collective resource and a privatized asset. The socialist making of a nation-state and its capitalist unmaking—a materialist account.
https://doi.org/10.64590/jnt 159, May June 2026 Earlier this summer, Mongolian protesters used old tyres to block the highway across the Gobi Desert from the vast Rio Tinto copper mine at Oyu Tolgoi, halting the stream of trucks that carry copper concentrate to China’s smelting plants and demanding a larger share of mining revenues. This was not the first wave of protests to be fuelled by claims for resource sovereignty, or anger over living standards, pollution or the corruption of the governing elite; Mongolia has seen multiple demonstrations over the past five years. But if these…
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