The micropolitics of Mining Capitalism

As international financial institutions pushed African governments to withdraw from the ownership
and management of businesses in the 1980s and 1990s, across the continent governments involved in mining enterprises sold off state-owned assets to private investors. Through the boom and bust cycles of the first decades of the twenty-first century, multinationals headquartered in Europe, Canada, and Australia, Chinese state-owned enterprises, Indian and Brazilian companies, and a range of smaller companies from South Africa and beyond invested billions in existing mines and new greenfield sites.
Reflecting on the wave of privatization and foreign investment, social science scholarship from the
2000s often framed mining as enclaved production, emphasizing how companies disentangle
themselves from the surrounding society and shed the social project previously associated with
parastatal companies (Ferguson 2005). Later, attention turned to the work that companies perform
to produce and securitise the enclave – through processes that inevitably create political and social
entanglements (Appel 2012; Hönke 2010).
The focus on the enclave rightly emphasizes the power of mining companies but can elide how the
entanglement of mining companies in different contexts produces a range of spaces and
infrastructures, social formations and networks, while reorienting others. It also overlooks how
different socio-political contexts shape mining operations. The politics of mining involves a wide
range of actors and institutions including contractor companies, trade unions, regulatory bodies,
courts, NGOs, and ethnic and community associations. Moreover, the micropolitics of mining plays
out amidst wider socio-political changes brought by liberalization and often interacts with reemerging politics of nationalism or government efforts to reclaim or reconfigure regulatory power.