Presentation short abstract

This presentation, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, contributes to extractivism studies in North Africa by examining how discreet re-appropriations of phosphate infrastructures in Gafsa, Tunisia, show these as sites through which claims to land, resources, and belonging are articulated.

Presentation long abstract

Despite the centrality of extraction to North Africa’s political economies, the region remains strikingly underrepresented, if not altogether absent, from the anthropology of resource extraction. This gap narrows our understanding of the frictions (Tsing 2005) that arise as colonial-era extractive projects persist and are reworked through new actors, technologies, and trajectories of capital. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in Gafsa's mining basin, in Tunisia, this presentation examines these frictions as they surface in discreet re-appropriations of phosphate extractive infrastructures. Gafsa’s landscape is marked by the enduring imprint of a colonial economy whose infrastructures (company towns, rail lines, water drills) continue to funnel raw phosphate from the interior toward the coast and its ports. While protests and strikes dominate Gafsa’s national image, I foreground the more discreet practices through which residents value, redirect, or subvert these infrastructures: the voluntary repainting of Redeyef’s train station during rail rehabilitation in 2024; the fencing of agricultural plots with discarded water-extraction pipes; farmers’ tolerated tapping of company water tanks; and the assertion that phosphate is of the people as it is extracted from their ancestral lands. By attending to these practices, I explore how extractive and colonial infrastructures are sites in which (neo)colonial histories are emerging, and through which claims claims to land, resources, and belonging are articulated.