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
journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-10, 03:40 authored by Maria Dyveke Styve, Paul GilbertPaul GilbertThis 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 SocietyISSN
2214-790XPublisher
ElsevierPublisher URL
External DOI
Volume
13Article number
a101100Department affiliated with
- Anthropology Publications
Full text available
- No
Peer reviewed?
- Yes