Short Abstract

This panel explores migration, militarisation and precarity across Africa’s mineral frontiers, examining how critical mineral extraction reshapes mobility, belonging, labour, and exclusion among artisanal mining communities.

Long Abstract

Africa’s mineral landscapes are being reshaped by the global scramble for critical minerals essential to the energy transition and the deepening precarity of artisanal and small-scale miners (ASM) who sustain much of this extraction. From gold in Ghana and lithium in Zimbabwe to manganese in South Africa and cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), artisanal miners are often mobile, crossing borders, regions, and informal-formal economic divides in search of livelihoods. These movements increasingly unfold across militarised mineral frontiers where state security forces, armed groups, and private security actors compete for control over resource-rich territories.

This panel examines the intersections of migration, militarisation, precarity, and mineral extraction as sites where belonging is negotiated and contested. It asks how militarised mineral frontiers reshape access to resources and mobility; how forced displacement in conflict-affected regions such as eastern DRC intersects with voluntary labour migration elsewhere; and how global demand for cobalt, lithium, manganese, and other critical minerals transforms existing forms of precarity. It further considers how racialised and gendered exclusions shape who is recognised as a legitimate stakeholder in mineral economies and who is rendered marginal, disposable, or displaced.

Bringing together ethnographic, political-economy, and policy-oriented perspectives, the panel invites papers on mobile and displaced mining communities, security regimes, formal and informal governance, gendered and racialised dimensions of extractive labour migration, and pathways towards more equitable integration of artisanal miners into critical mineral supply chains. It seeks to illuminate how belonging is claimed, denied, and reworked along Africa’s militarised mineral frontiers.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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