Peasant actions in the face of the Cameroon–South Korea irrigated rice project in Nkoteng

This article analyzes the repertoires of collective action of the peasant communities of Nkoteng (Centre, Cameroon) in response to the irrigated rice project carried out by the Cameroonian state and the Republic of Korea since 2011, transferred by the Korean side to the Cameroonian government in 2018. These farmers, dependent on customary access to land, have been mobilizing since 2024 against the project’s 200-hectare extension in Avangane, Bankeng, and Ndoumba. Based on a qualitative survey conducted in February–March 2026 and interviews with agents of the state’s decentralized services, the article brings into dialogue the literature on infrapolitics and everyday resistance (Scott), the socio-anthropology of development, and the sociology of mobilizations. The observed repertoires—discursive and symbolic, administrative, direct physical—constitute an infrapolitical resistance that is tactically effective but structurally capped. The article argues that this ceiling stems not from any deficit of consciousness or militancy among the peasants, but from the control that intermediaries exert over the circulation of the cause—via a customary tier that filters consent to the land transfer, and a managerial tier that, since the 2018 handover, captures the operational rent. The boundary between infrapolitics and social movement is thereby displaced: It is drawn not on the side of the dominated’s maturity, but on the side of the actors who hold the threshold of publicization.