Paper short abstract:

Extraction-induced displacement processes are key in the (re)production of extractive subjectivities, entailing a process of "making legible" for company and the state. Based on research with resettlement managers in Mozambique, "making legible" results as a fraught and ambivalent process.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on a particular aspect of extractive governmentality: the management of displacement of people caused by land use for extractive projects. Technically called mining-induced resettlement processes, these often-controversial displacement and compensation processes are key in the (re)production of extractive subjectivities. Drawing from Trouillot’s (2001) notion of the “legibility effect”, I focus on how populations affected by such forms of displacement become legible for the company and the state and thereby possibly eligible for compensation. Key in this process are resettlement managers who conduct baseline studies, community consultations, manage expectations, and develop and implement Resettlement Action Plans. In this paper I explore the complex apparatus involved in “making legible” by drawing on my research with resettlement managers in Mozambique’s booming extractive sector and my participation in a course for resettlement managers in Maputo. I detail how resettlement managers through such trainings, international standards, and company rules acquire the language, knowledge, and techniques to “make legible”, which is perceived as apolitical, technological, efficient, and time-sensitive process. Additionally, I explore how Mozambican resettlement managers regard their role as being in-between the (often-foreign) extractive company and “local populations” and how they come to understand “local populations” as beneficiaries whom they can uplift potentially from poverty and as “profiteers”, who are likely to take advantage of the project. Consequently, I argue that “making legible” for mining-induced resettlement is a fraught and ambivalent process, that renders technical (Li 2007) and is part of the “quieter registers of dispossession” (Frederiksen and Himley 2020).