Navigating plural legal constellations at the coal mining frontier in Mozambique

In this article, I will focus on the emergence and dynamics of different laws, standards, and norms in the context of an extractive frontier. The extractive frontier is presented as a place where multiple jurisdictions overlap and in which new governance constellations and practices emerge. This article focuses on the laws and standards related to resettlement processes and compensation for loss of residence, land, and livelihood in the surroundings of two coal mines in Tete province, Mozambique. Resettlement processes are one of the most direct ways in which populations are affected by extractive projects and often associated with human rights violations. The paper focuses on resettlement officers of the mining companies who are at the forefront of planning and implementing such processes. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, including interviews with resettlement officers and participation in their daily lives, the article details how these individuals position themselves in relation to multiple sets of laws and rules (e.g. Standards of the International Finance Corporation, state mining law and resettlement regulation, land law, human rights law) and a variety of actors (e.g. mining companies, international finance institutes, government agencies, local populations, NGOs). Resettlement officers often work with standards that surpass national law but are in their implementation of regulations also curtailed by a seemingly absent state, divergent company policies, critical civil society organisations, and global commodity markets. A focus on the everyday intricacies of the work of resettlement officers, shows their power and constraints, and the dynamics by which hierarchies of rules and laws become unsettled at the extractive frontier

Corporate sovereignty: Negotiating permissive power for profit in Southern Africa

The growing engagement with sovereignty in anthropology has resulted in a range of concepts that encapsulate how various (non-state) actors execute power. In this paper, we further unpack the concept of ‘corporate sovereignty’ and outline its conceptual significance. Corporate sovereignty refers to performative claims to power undertaken by (individuals aligned to) corporate entities with profit-making objectives within a state-sanctioned space. This contrasts with claims made by other (non-state) actors who operate in a permissive space that (regularly) lacks this legally grounded relationship with the state. By unpacking this state-sanctioned permissive space and highlighting the role of the state as the arbiter, our approach to corporate sovereignty offers a new comparative analytical perspective to theorize how sovereignty is performed and opens ethnographic avenues to explore how sovereignty is negotiated and co-produced across diverse localities. To elucidate our argument, we draw from ethnographic fieldwork conducted on coal mining companies in Mozambique and private security companies in South Africa. By focusing on cases that differ, we want to show the multitude of ways in which corporate sovereignty is enacted and takes shape

Beyond Reintegration: War Veteranship in Mozambique and El Salvador

This article proposes the concept of ‘war veteranship’ to better understand war veterans’ positioning in and engagement with post‐war societies and state‐building processes. The study is based on ethnographic research with former insurgent movements, specifically the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO) in Mozambique and the Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation (FMLN) in El Salvador. The concept of war veteranship allows for the exploration of trajectories of former combatants not necessarily, and certainly not exclusively, in terms of reintegration, but rather in relation to the manifold ways in which the status and connections associated with armed group participation may hold currency in the veterans’ lives, and particularly in relation to political processes. The article argues that war veteranship is best understood as a distinct type of post‐war citizenship. Integral to the political accommodations that shape post‐war societies, war veteranship involves the construction, negotiation and contestation of the societal status of different categories of war veterans. Drawing on the analyses of political struggles of war veterans in RENAMO and FMLN over two decades, this study's findings underscore the longue‐durée socio‐political relevance of war veteranship, extending above and beyond reintegration efforts

After Mining: contrived dereliction, dualistic time and the moment of rupture in the presentation of mining heritage.

Since the early twentieth century, attempts have been made to promote sites relating to mining as industrial heritage. Since the rise of the heritage industry in the 1980s, the number and size of the mining sites being managed and promoted as heritage destinations has dramatically increased across the West. This paper will examine how the strategies for interpreting such sites rely on different temporal constructions. As well as outlining the ‘technological development’ approach and its association with linear time, the paper will unpack the key features of the less understood strategy of ‘contrived dereliction’ and the dualistic temporal framework that it relies on. This argument will reference a range of mining heritage sites visited and researched by the author: Kennecott, Skagway and Dyea in Alaska, Bodie in California and Geevor in Cornwall. The paper will also identify how curators have used the moment of rupture that can feature in dualistic temporal constructions to promote a specific political viewpoint and consider the social consequences of accepting the dualistic temporal construction that underpins contrived dereliction

Violent spirits and a messy peace : Against romanticizing local understandings and practices of peace in Mozambique

In the wake of massive atrocities, religious or cosmologic expressions and practices may provide a tremendous resource for healing or transitional justice for both the individual and the collective. Yet all too often, such practices and ideas end up being portrayed in reified, romanticized and one-dimensional ways. This chapter presents the much-celebrated purification rituals of ex-combatants in postwar Mozambique as a phenomenon that has been subject to such “romanticizing”. It provides a thick description of intersections of violence and healing and the spiritual world and thereby presents three elements deemed essential for ethnographic peace research: 1) a multiplicity of interpretations, 2) a caution not to assume that local peace initiatives are inherently inclusive and harmonious, and 3) a long-term or multi-temporal focus

Imagining Booms and Busts: Conflicting Temporalities and the Extraction-"Development" nexus in Mozambique

This article presents three sets of divergent and competing understandings of temporalities in relation to the extractive industry in Mozambique, in order to explore the dynamics of power within expectations of "development" raised by extractive mega projects. The first set of understandings involves a forward-looking, long-term view of the extractive industry's potential to bring transformational "development" to Mozambique and its people, generally expressed by the extractive industry and associated actors. Subsequently, the article zooms in on a specific extractive sector; the coal industry in Tete province. The second set is characterized by expressions of volatility by an elite group of businesspeople who were lured by the promise of a coal boom, and who explain the urban "development" in terms of before, during and after "the boom". The third set delves into the experience and expressions of "waiting" by people who were resettled by coal mining companies in Tete. By presenting these three sets, the article aims to go beyond binary analyses of the local versus the national, and the community versus the company or state, and offers a layered analysis of the disconnections between understandings of "development" and the expected wealth of resource extraction

Navigating plural legal constellations at the coal mining frontier in Mozambique

In this article, I will focus on the emergence and dynamics of different laws, standards, and norms in the context of an extractive frontier. The extractive frontier is presented as a place where multiple jurisdictions overlap and in which new governance constellations and practices emerge. This article focuses on the laws and standards related to resettlement processes and compensation for loss of residence, land, and livelihood in the surroundings of two coal mines in Tete province, Mozambique. Resettlement processes are one of the most direct ways in which populations are affected by extractive projects and often associated with human rights violations. The paper focuses on resettlement officers of the mining companies who are at the forefront of planning and implementing such processes. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, including interviews with resettlement officers and participation in their daily lives, the article details how these individuals position themselves in relation to multiple sets of laws and rules (e.g. Standards of the International Finance Corporation, state mining law and resettlement regulation, land law, human rights law) and a variety of actors (e.g. mining companies, international finance institutes, government agencies, local populations, NGOs). Resettlement officers often work with standards that surpass national law but are in their implementation of regulations also curtailed by a seemingly absent state, divergent company policies, critical civil society organisations, and global commodity markets. A focus on the everyday intricacies of the work of resettlement officers, shows their power and constraints, and the dynamics by which hierarchies of rules and laws become unsettled at the extractive frontier

Violent spirits and a messy peace : Against romanticizing local understandings and practices of peace in Mozambique

In the wake of massive atrocities, religious or cosmologic expressions and practices may provide a tremendous resource for healing or transitional justice for both the individual and the collective. Yet all too often, such practices and ideas end up being portrayed in reified, romanticized and one-dimensional ways. This chapter presents the much-celebrated purification rituals of ex-combatants in postwar Mozambique as a phenomenon that has been subject to such “romanticizing”. It provides a thick description of intersections of violence and healing and the spiritual world and thereby presents three elements deemed essential for ethnographic peace research: 1) a multiplicity of interpretations, 2) a caution not to assume that local peace initiatives are inherently inclusive and harmonious, and 3) a long-term or multi-temporal focus

Resettlement in Mozambique: Development, Displacement and Control in the (Post)Colony

Mozambique has a long history of resettling people in urbanizations that are centrally initiated and shaped by development discourses and governments’ desire to control populations. This article places the recent resettlements in the surroundings of extractive projects in the country in a historical context, by comparing the aldeamentos created by the Portuguese colonial administration with the aldeais comunais by FRELIMO after independence. It focuses on successive resettlement initiatives in the Tete province, where mining-induced resettlement has recently received much attention. Despite the disparate political contexts, it demonstrates similarities between the resettlement projects, which have resulted in hardship for the dislocated populations

Learning lessons and curbing criticism: Legitimizing involuntary resettlement and extractive projects in Mozambique

Since 2011, thousands of people have been resettled in the province of Tete, central Mozambique to make way for open-pit coal mines. These resettlements have received widespread criticism for impoverishing already vulnerable communities and for the repressive action taken against local opposition. This repression is part of a broader array of reactions “from above” that have emerged in relation to protest. One of these reactions “from above” is that representatives of the government of Mozambique and extractive multinational companies increasingly address resettlement in Tete as a process to learn lessons from. These lessons learning practices legitimize future resettlement processes elsewhere, particularly in relation to a highly valued project of liquid natural gas (LNG) extraction in northern Mozambique. Moreover, this approach results in the de-facto co-optation of environmentalist non-governmental organizations (NGOs), whose agendas and funding possibilities are also increasingly tuned towards learning lessons from “Tete” to improve future resettlement elsewhere. Meanwhile, the opposition of those affected by resettlement in Tete is losing resonance, allowing the coal mining companies to continue with business as usual. The data presented in this article is derived from observations made during government-organized national conferences on resettlement in November 2016 and 2018, and additional ethnographic fieldwork over the course of 2016 and 2017 in Maputo and Tete. I take these conferences as a starting point to analyze the politics of evaluation, the legitimization of displacement for extractive projects, and the co-optation of criticism