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- Convenors:
-
Asebe Regassa Debelo
(University of Zurich)
Gutu Olana Wayessa (University of Helsinki)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Economy and Development (x) Decoloniality & Knowledge Production (y)
- Location:
- Neues Seminargebäude, Seminarraum 23
- Sessions:
- Thursday 1 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
Africa has become a new resource frontier in the global political economy. The new resource rush entangles future imaginations about the "Africa Rising" narrative with the colonial past. Postcolonial states also reproduce notions of Africa's poverty in their pursuit to legitimise resource extraction
Long Abstract:
Since the turn of the 21st century, Africa’s resource frontiers marked the convergence of classical geographical imaginations of the margins of the state as ‘full of resources but empty of people’, and violent capitalist accumulation. Developmentalist narratives of postcolonial states, coupled with historical center-periphery relations, enunciated a new vision of the future and representation of the past about spaces and societies. Resource frontiers are now marked as Africa’s futures: the notion of ‘Africa Rising’ often casts future development on conversion of these spaces into productive commodities. States often legitimize violent processes of installing sovereign authority in peripheral regions as a continuation of state building projects. In a nutshell, Africa’s resource frontiers represent what Anna Tsing calls frictions, or epistemic and discursive encounters entailing the assemblage of history, geographical imaginations, and visions of the future (development and state consolidation). This panel invites papers that critically address resource frontiers as material, spatial and discursive spaces upon which state’s representation of the past and visions for the future encounter local epistemologies and practices. In this panel, we also aim to interrogate violence, extraction and state consolidation nexus linking to local and extra-local political and economic dynamics. The panel welcomes theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions on resource sovereignty, violence at the margins of the state, political economy of extraction, political ecology of nature conservation, mega-development schemes, displacement and resource dispossession, social-environmental justice, environmental conflict, and other related topics.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 1 June, 2023, -Fergus O'Leary Simpson (University of Antwerp)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will introduce a new heuristic device, ‘contract politics', to investigate the complex assemblage of social agreements and expectations that surround nature conservation projects located at resource frontiers in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)
Paper long abstract:
By introducing a new heuristic device, ‘contract politics', this paper will investigate the social assemblage of agreements and expectations around a nature conservation project in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Fundamentally, contract politics is about the ‘political marketplace’ of – formal and informal, public and private, licit and illicit – contract-makers and contract-takers which come together to determine regimes of resource control. This is particularly relevant in conflictual settings, where a stable agreement has failed to emerge between state and subject; and instead, an intricate mosaic of contracts overlap and interact, sometimes peacefully sometimes contentiously, between a variety of state and non-state actors. The paper will operationalize the heuristic by exploring how different actors come together to assert control over and contest access to land and resources around a UNESCO World Heritage Site ‘in danger’, namely, Kahuzi-Biega National Park. In this context, the Congolese state’s conservation agency (ICCN), conservation NGOs, eco-guards, the government military, non-state armed groups, and local resource users all engage in the politics of contracts in one form or another. Agreements between these actors sometimes generate outcomes favourable to the preservation of ecosystems and biodiversity; though at other times, they prioritize the kind of extractive resource uses which degrade environmental values. Using the contract politics heuristic, scholars will be able to better understand the complex social relationships and interactions that affect nature conservation projects located in Africa's resource frontiers.
Francesco Vacchiano (University Ca' Foscari Venice)
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses the contradictory imaginaries of wellbeing, growth and emancipation mobilised by the new extraction initiatives in the new resource frontier of Cabo Delgado, Mozambique
Paper long abstract:
In Mozambique, the end of the civil war in 1992 triggered twenty years of sustained growth, which has recently come to a break following the revelation of the so-called divida occulta (‘hidden debt’), over two billion dollars of public loans hidden by the government to public opinion and the international community. In order to face the ensuing economic crisis, the government has further relied on extractive economy, endorsing initiatives on different scales: on the one hand, small and localized mining licenses, granted mainly to national investors, that have in fact boosted the so-called “garimpo” (self-made mining); on the other hand, large and ambitious projects, entrusted to foreign companies, called upon to provide know-how, technologies and capital. However, in the most affected areas, located primarily in the north of the country, this new extractive impulse has produced environmental and social disruption, also due to the consequences of land- and water-grabbing on the local population. As a result, a new conflict broke out in the province of Cabo Delgado, whose protagonists are groups of insurgents who justify violent actions through the language of radical Islamism. Based on my fieldwork in the area since 2017, this contribution presents some cases of extractive projects (including the large-scale initiatives of Eni and Total in Cabo Delgado) to discuss the contradictory imaginaries of wellbeing, growth, and emancipation that they produce: hopes for self-entrepreneurial success in transnational markets among small local investors; search for imported capital, technologies and manpower among the country’s elite; forms of struggle moulded upon the trans-local grammar of radical Islam among the disenfranchised youth.
Sophie van Huellen (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
Powerful first-tier suppliers vertically integrate to secure supply, binding framers to them via certification schemes and increasingly credit. Taking Ghanaian cocoa farmers as an example, we argue that these developments reproduce long-term dependencies between farmers and multinational buyers.
Paper long abstract:
The financialisation of agri-food chains has changed the ways in which farmers in the Global South integrate into global sourcing and production structures. The changing nature of their integration is driven in parts by a reconfiguration of the operations of first-tier suppliers, which increasingly operate akin to financial corporations. In their competition for a higher market share, first-tier suppliers have integrated vertically, binding farmers to them through certification schemes, and increasingly also financial services. The Covid-19 crisis has further accelerated the upstream penetration with a push towards the digitalisation of payments and credit. This paper explores the implications of this new mode of integration for cocoa farmers’ livelihoods in Ghana. We hypothesise that this expansion of banking services to farmers by first-tier suppliers establishes and reproduces long-term dependencies between farmers and first-tier suppliers by locking farmers into a relationship of debt, thereby securing bean supply for first-tier suppliers. These developments are analysed in the political economy context of a fall-out of the leading West African cocoa-producing countries Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire with major first-tier suppliers that source their beans from them over the Living Income Differential (LID). The direct or indirect resistance of some of the major buyers to pay the LID has resulted in a rethinking of producer countries on how to cut out these powerful middlemen in the cocoa-chocolate value chain. Frist-tier suppliers have responded with a renewed push for vertical integration through the extension of credit and other financial services to farmers to secure sufficient volume.
Marketta Vuola (University of Helsinki)
Paper short abstract:
Capitalist-statist efforts to establish the forest as controlled, modern and productive clash with the more-than-human landscape of Ranomafana’s forests in Madagascar.
Paper long abstract:
This study examines a persistent frontier in Ranomafana at the eastern rainforest corridor of Madagascar. The pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial states have viewed Ranomafana as the source of cheap labour or natural resources such as coffee, gold and for the past three decades, nature conservation and ecotourism services. During the past decade, violence has erupted between the military and those hiding or mining gold illicitly in the forest. While the state represents the current conflict as one between legal and illegal, preservation and extraction, this study argues that the contradiction is rather between a forest landscape and the capitalist-statist attempts to establish it as productive, controllable and modernised. As these capitalist fantasies arrive in Ranomafana, they have come into an uncomfortable contact with the more-than-human landscape that is not compatible with such ambitions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and a review of historical literature, this study traces the processes of rural transformation in Ranomafana by considering the agency of the forest itself. The mountainous cloud forest has played a significant role shaping the frontier. Tools such as debt and privatisation of land – common to rural frontiers across the world that drive capital accumulation and social differentiation – have created conditions that force forest people to conduct the hard, muddy and dangerous labour needed to produce commodities out of this landscape. Yet, the forest continues to provide obscurity, which enhances the possibilities of some forms of accumulation over others while it also provides a space to escape the state and capital.