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The hole in the ground that cannot be moved_ REVISED 22Nov.pdf (358.07 kB)

‘The hole in the ground that cannot be moved’: political risk as a racial vernacular of extractive industry development

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journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-10, 03:40 authored by Maria Dyveke Styve, Paul GilbertPaul Gilbert
This paper draws on two independently conducted ethnographies of mining finance centred on connections between London and South Africa (2012-14 & 2016-17), and research on the political risk industry in the UK and South Africa (2017-19). We show that the discourse of ‘political risk’ in the mining market constitutes a racial vernacular of extractive industry development which purports to concern itself with ‘real’ insurable risks, but in fact expresses racialized anxieties about the expression of sovereignty over resources in post-colonial states. We draw attention to the two, complementary extractive temporalities that arise from this racial vernacular of extractive industry development: a forward-looking process of folding anxieties about political risk into speculative valuations of mineral projects ‘that cannot be moved’, and a historicising temporality characterised by silencing the histories of anti-colonial attempts to remake the international economic order – a silencing upon which the authority of political risk discourse depends.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

Extractive Industries and Society

ISSN

2214-790X

Publisher

Elsevier

Volume

13

Article number

a101100

Department affiliated with

  • Anthropology Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2022-05-26

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2022-05-26

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