Original article
Mining in comparative perspective: Trends, transformations and theories

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2019.03.009Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Some of the social-scientific scholarship on mining suffers from disciplinary insularity and theoretical narrow-mindedness.

  • There is a strong need for more comparative and interdisciplinary research about mining issues.

  • Transcending disciplinary boundaries is necessary to better understand mining-related structures, processes and practices.

Abstract

This article offers a brief introduction to a special issue based on a selection of papers originally presented at an international mining conference in Ghent (Belgium) in December 2017. The aim of the conference was to promote a comparative and multidisciplinary approach to a selective number of political, economic and socio-cultural aspects of mining in the Global South. The five papers included in the special issue have been grouped around three main themes: (1) mining elites, (2) the antagonism between artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) and large-scale mining (LSM), and (3) mining in a globalizing world.

Introduction

The papers included in this special issue were originally presented at an international mining conference in Ghent on 13–14 December 2017. The aim of this two-day conference, hosted by the Conflict Research Group of Ghent University, was to take stock of a selective number of trends and developments in current research on the political, economic and socio-cultural aspects of mining in the Global South, bringing together scholars from different fields in the social sciences and the humanities, including political science, development studies, anthropology and history. The approach we sought to promote and stimulate was a comparative and multidisciplinary one. Without wanting to downplay the value of paying attention to historical and cultural specificities, we invited participants in this conference to critically reflect on new and perhaps more fruitful ways to make theoretical sense of mining-related structures, processes and practices that seem to occur in different settings, contexts and historical epochs. While conference participants were obviously free to rely on their own disciplinary knowledge and to draw on their familiarity with a given area and/or era, we also wanted to offer them the opportunity to leave their comfort zone and to engage in scholarly debate with colleagues working on other continents and/or writing from different theoretical perspectives.

The idea for organizing this conference was born from a growing frustration about disciplinary insularity and theoretical narrow-mindedness in some of the social-scientific research about mining. At the risk of using a worn-out cliché, mining scholars working in the social sciences and the humanities sometimes seem to suffer from tunnel vision. Apart from overestimating the uniqueness of the phenomena they are encountering in the field, they sometimes show a disturbing tendency to analyze empirical data from the same angles, only using the tried and tested theories of their respective disciplines and only attending conferences and workshops where they can meet colleagues having the same disciplinary background, working in the same geographical areas, or being specialized in the same types of mining or minerals. In that sense, they behave – ironically – somewhat like the miners whose lives and practices they are studying during fieldwork: people who spend a considerable part of their days working underground, where they are completely disconnected from what is happening in the outside world. The ambition of the conference was to break away from this scholarly tunnel vision.

Five panels were convened by the members of the organizing committee1 : (1) mining and urbanization, (2) mining and informalization, (3) mining-induced displacement and resettlement, (4) mining and violence, and (5) ASM in Central and Southern Africa. However, since only a limited number of paper presenters at the conference submitted their paper for publication, the coherence of this special issue has been ensured by identifying three main themes: mining elites, the antagonism between ASM and LSM, and mining in a globalizing world. In what follows, I will briefly explain how the selected papers relate to these three themes and what they contribute to the existing literature.

Section snippets

Mining elites

A frequently identified pattern in the literature about the role of elites in large-scale mining projects is that transnational mining corporations are highly dependent on local allies to facilitate their business operations. In an anthropological study of the mining and petroleum sector of Papua New Guinea, for instance, Golub has shown that local corporate elites make large-scale extractive projects possible by mobilizing their personal connections with influential figures in Port Moresby,

The antagonism between ASM and LSM

The spectacular expansion of ASM in recent decades has led to an uneasy relationship with LSM. The coexistence of the two forms of mining has become increasingly characterized by antagonism, tension and violence (Ballard and Banks, 2003; Aubynn, 2009; Geenen and Verweijen, 2017). In many mineral-rich countries around the world, and especially in the Global South, governments tend to consider ASM as a temporary phenomenon, an economic activity that needs to be discouraged and even eradicated in

Mining in a globalizing world

Global mineral resource flows started attracting the attention of social scientists and scholars in the humanities long before globalization became a buzzword in academic debates in the 1990s. Offering a survey of world economic history since around 1400, Wolf (2010 (1982)), a leading figure in Marxist-influenced anthropology in the 1970s, produced several examples of the enormous historical depth of the global trade in minerals, pointing out that, as early as the 9th century, immense

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the members of the organizing committee for all the time and energy they invested in helping to prepare the conference, and I also wish to thank all the participants for sharing their insights, findings and contributions to the discussions during this conference. A very special thanks goes to the editor-in-chief of EXIS, Gavin Hilson, not only for delivering an inspiring keynote speech at the conference, but also for giving us the opportunity to

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