Short Abstract

From Southern Africa’s ‘mineral revolution’ to today’s critical-minerals boom, this panel follows the fragmentation and recombination of extractive infrastructures, tracing how they have reshaped relations between states, capital, labour and territories.

Long Abstract

In the late 19th century, Southern Africa experienced a ‘mineral revolution’: the discovery and exploitation of capital-intensive mines that rapidly transformed a collection of fragmented, pastoral societies into a region tied together by ‘financial investment, labour migration and railways’. This panel asks what became of these infrastructures from the 1970s onwards, as decolonisation, resource nationalism and liberation struggles unsettled relations between states and mining capital, before liberalisation, privatisation and corporate restructuring further fragmented the institutions through which mining had been organised.

Rather than reading this history as one of infrastructural decline or state retreat, we examine processes of fragmentation and recombination. Older infrastructures were dismantled, repurposed or articulated with new arrangements for logistics, energy, labour, corporate ownership, law and finance. We therefore understand extractive infrastructures broadly: as railways, ports, grids, dams and mines - and as the legal, financial, human and professional networks through which resources are extracted, circulated and transformed into value. Following these infrastructures across time and space provides a distinctive vantage point on changing relations between states, capital, labour and territories, while unsettling any simple distinction between Southern Africa and an external “global” economy: extractive infrastructures have historically connected the region to financial centres, corporate networks and expertise elsewhere.

We invite contributions examining the provisioning, circulation and valuation of extraction in Southern Africa, historically or in the present. Against the contemporary critical-minerals boom, the panel asks how apparently new geographies of extractive capitalism build upon, repurpose or recombine infrastructures inherited from colonial, apartheid and postcolonial configurations.

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