This article traces the geography of the "conflict minerals" campaign and its impact on artisanal mining in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, a region that currently emerges as a pioneer case of traceability and due diligence efforts with regard to the exploitation and trade in tantalum, tungsten and tin. We subsequently analyse the opening and attempted closure of the Congolese resource frontier in the context of recent market reform, and we describe how this process has accompanied a transnational corporate-government nexus bent on monopolising Congo's artisanal 3 T resources. Specifically, we argue how the conflict minerals campaign and its implementation "on the ground" has brought about a harmful, disruptive logic for an artisanal mining sector that is notoriously categorised as unruly, illegal, and informal, but of which upstream stakeholders have in practice been jeopardised by transnational reform. We thus shift the attention from questions on the political economy of "resource wars" towards a deeper understanding of the intersecting spaces of production and regulation that underpin formalisation and traceability of "conflict minerals" in this protracted conflict environment. Résumé: Cet article retrace la géographie de la campagne contre les «minerais de conflit» et son impact sur l'exploitation minière artisanale à l'est de la République Démocratique du Congo (RDC), une région qui émerge actuellement comme un cas pionnier d'efforts de traçabilité et de diligence raisonnable à l'égard de l'exploitation et du commerce de tantale, tungstène et étain (3 T). Nous analysons l'ouverture et la fermeture tentative de cette «frontière de ressources» en RDC dans le contexte de cette intervention récente, et nous décrivons comment ce processus accompagne l'émergence d'un assemblage transnational qui soutient une monopolisation progressive des ressources artisanales 3 T. Précisément, nous analysons la façon dont la campagne contre les «minerais de conflit» et sa mise en oeuvre «sur terrain» a provoqué une logique néfaste et disruptive pour un secteur d'exploitation minière artisanale qui est notoirement jugé indiscipliné, illégal et informel, mais dont les parties prenantes en amont de la chaine d'approvisionnement ont été largement mis en péril. Nous déplaçons ainsi l'attention sur l'économie politique des «guerres de ressources» en portant l'analyse vers une compréhension plus profonde des espaces d'intersection entre production et régulation qui proposent la formalisation et traçabilité des minerais comme solution aux problèmes plus larges liés aux conflits armés.
2020) Brokering between (not so) overt and (not so) covert networks in conflict zones, Global Crime, 21:1, 74-110,
ABSTRACTThere is a tendency to consider covert networks as separate from overt networks. Drawing on data from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, we demonstrate that this is not the case and identify how covert and overt networks are mutually constitutive. While most studies of African brokers have relied on network metaphors like 'Big Men' and 'social membranes', we consider the embeddedness of 'covert' networks in 'overt' networks explicitly. We perform two analyses on a large original dataset encompassing 396 partially overlapping ego-nets obtained from a hybrid link-tracing design. An ego-net analysis reveals a large degree of homophily and a deep embeddedness of the different networks. A multilevel exponential random graph model fitted to the reconstructed network of a 110-node subset shows that demobilised combatants are the actors likely to broker between armed groups, state forces, and civilian blocs, suggesting their capacity to broker peace or foment war.
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