Styve, Maria Dyveke and Gilbert, Paul (2022) ‘The hole in the ground that cannot be moved’: political risk as a racial vernacular of extractive industry development. Extractive Industries and Society. a101100. ISSN 2214-790X

PDF - Accepted Version Restricted to SRO admin only until 4 December 2023. Available under License Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial No Derivatives. Download (366kB)

Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Political Risk, South Africa, Finance, New International Economic Order, Race, Extractive Industries
Schools and Departments:	School of Global Studies > Anthropology
SWORD Depositor:	Mx Elements Account
Depositing User:	Mx Elements Account
Date Deposited:	26 May 2022 07:17
Last Modified:	22 Jun 2022 07:01
URI:	http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/106092

View download statistics for this item

📧 Request an update