Paper short abstract:

This paper questions the problem of the past in the future of Africa’s relationship with the world economy from the viewpoint of the under-studied nexus between critical minerals’ global value chains and the roles of justification and codification played by legal intermediaries.

Paper long abstract:

In the past fifteen years, the formidable stakes of Africa’s geological wealth for the ‘energy transition’ have triggered a new Scramble. In 2019, the Economist judged the current scramble more ‘benign’ due to the unprecedented extent of foreign diplomatic, strategic, and commercial ties – with former imperial European cores, along with the US, China and other emerging economies. In Burundi, where rare earths have recently started been extracted at an industrial scale, but whose colonial and postcolonial trajectory has been characterized by acute levels of violence, the current scramble appears a repeat from the past. This paper questions the problem of the past in the future of Africa’s relationship with the world economy from the viewpoint of the under-studied nexus between critical minerals’ global value chains and the roles of justification and codification played by legal intermediaries. Embracing the global turn in history, law and political sociology, it examines this relationship in the framework of “imperial encounters” (drawing on Bertrand 2007) as symbolic, institutional, and professional spaces of reciprocal yet unequal connections between the African South and the world. Articulated with ethnographic fieldwork in Burundi, participant observation at international conferences, and ethnographic work on international dispute settlement mechanisms - this theoretical framework underscores Burundi’s trajectory as exceptional (due to the combination of dependent extraversion of the field of state power, and predatory extraction of the country’s resources) and characteristic of the structural effects of the relationship between law, politics and capital accumulation in negotiating Africa’s position in globalization.