Improvisational economies: Coltan production in the eastern Congo

Mantz, Jeffrey W.

doi:10.1111/j.1469-8676.2008.00035.x

Cited by 73 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Anthropologists have probed the relation between wars fought for resources and the unintended though often predictable modes and sites of transaction that follow, mapping violence and its reverberations across time and space (e.g., Malkki 1995;Gusterson 1996;Lutz 2001;Nordstrom 2004;Mantz 2008). This comes as no surprise.…”

Section: War Tolls and Their Reckoningmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Curious Trade: The Recovery and Repatriation of U.S. Missing In Action from the Vietnam War

Wagner

2015

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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Amid its human and material tolls, the Vietnam War has given rise to a curious enterprise—the complex process of recovering and repatriating the remains of U.S. service members Missing In Action (MIA) and presumed dead. In this trade, the bones that “count” are American and the aims underwriting the forensic efforts to return them are rooted in an ideology of national belonging.The resultant exchange of both knowledge and physical remains has developed through two historically intertwined ventures: state-sponsored casualty resolution efforts; and the much smaller, informal trafficking of skeletal remains, identification media, and information about American MIAs. This article examines how these sought-after bones tack between roles as objects of recovery, sale, or barter, scientific study, ritual burial, and public commemoration. Through their mutable worth, MIA remains illustrate the dynamic symbolism of war dead that evokes differing sensibilities about familiar or foreign soil, about care and belonging. Like the reliquiae of medieval Christianity, remains of missing service members, even in the most fragmentary form, are replete with the suggestion of power. Their pursuit depends on reciprocity. Indeed, more than just powerful symbols, these bones manifest and confer power itself, as caring for war dead demonstrates authority, and such authority falls to those who control access to the desired object, whether through formal or informal channels. Furthermore, power requires authentication, and the remains of missing American war dead become, in this system of circulation and exchange, a means to demonstrate knowledge, perform certainty, or exploit ambiguity.

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Section: War Tolls and Their Reckoningmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Curious Trade: The Recovery and Repatriation of U.S. Missing In Action from the Vietnam War

Wagner

2015

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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“…Tantalus, which is extracted from coltan, is used as a high-charge conductor for mobile phones and a variety of other products associated with digital technologies. The insatiable global demand for digital technologies drives the trade in coltan between foreigners and their Congolese collaborators -the local militiasand has turned coltan into what Mantz calls "the blood diamond of the digital age" (Mantz, 2008). Thus, coltan is traded for hard currency which in turn is used to buy arms for itinerant warlords who feature in the civil wars fought in the DRC (Smith, 2011).…”

Section: Congomentioning

confidence: 99%

Civil Wars and the Right to Self-Determination

Salako¹

2013

ILR

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Thucydides was the first analyst of civil war: the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta (431-404 BC). Since then, the technology of war has radically changed but not the nature of man. Most of the wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were civil wars and most of these wars were caused by political, economic and legal factors and by the quest for secession. The civil wars of the twenty-first century are not different from those of the previous centuries.The object of this article is to analyse the causes and legality of civil wars and assess critically the scope of peoples' right to self-determination in international law with a view to determining whether the right (as it stands) can be used by a racial or religious group in a state to effect radical transformation of the whole state or to justify secession from the state.Finally, the feasibility and desirability of reconceptualising peoples' right to self-determination to justify secession in case of unremitting persecution, when it is clear that attempts to achieve internal self-determination have failed, are evaluated.

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“…Similarly, initial optimism about an alleged 'clean energy transition' has more recently been tempered with critical analyses of the reliance of such technologies on rare earth elements (REEs) and other minerals, suggesting a complex relationship between lower-carbon energy and land use changes related to the expansion or intensification of mining activities (Jeffries 2015;Vidal et al 2013). Coincidentally, most of the world's supply of REEs is presently controlled by China (US Government Accountability Office [GAO] 2010), whereas other crucial minerals used to manufacture advanced electronics -such as coltan and cassiterite -are frequently sourced from conflict zones such as the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which retains an estimated 80 percent of global reserves of the latter (Mantz 2008). Moreover, as Siamanta (2017) notes in relation to state support for the 'green' photovoltaics industry in Greece, subsidies and other incentives for the large-scale production of 'clean' energy technologies may in fact contribute to the impoverishment of low and middle-income consumers via the imposition of higher energy prices.…”

Section: Journal Of Political Ecologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Political ecology, variegated green economies, and the foreclosure of alternative sustainabilities

Cavanagh

Benjaminsen

2017

Journal of Political Ecology

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Over the past two decades, political ecologists have provided extensive critiques of the privatization, commodification, and marketization of nature, including of the new forms of accumulation and appropriation that these might facilitate under the more recent guise of green growth and the green economy. These critiques have often demonstrated that such approaches can retain deleterious implications for certain vulnerable populations across the developing world and beyond. With few exceptions, however, political ecologists have paid decidedly less attention to expounding upon alternative initiatives for pursuing both sustainability and socio-environmental justice. Accordingly, the contributions to this Special Section engage the concept of the green economy explicitly as a terrain of struggle, one inevitably conditioned by the variegated forms that actually-existing 'green economy' strategies ultimately take in specific historical and geographical conjunctures. In doing so, they highlight the ways in which there is likewise not one but many potential sustainabilities for pursuing human and non-human well-being in the ostensibly nascent Anthropocene, each of which reflects alternative -and, potentially, more progressive -constellations of social, political, and economic relations. Yet they also foreground diverse efforts to pre-empt or to foreclose upon these alternatives, highlighting an implicit politics of precisely whose conception of sustainability is deemed to be possible or desirable in any given time and place. In exploring such struggles over alternative sustainabilities and the 'ecologies of hope' that they implicitly offer, then, this introduction first reviews the current frontiers of these debates, before illuminating how the contributions to this issue both intersect with and build upon them. Key words: Green economy; political ecology; political economy; alternative sustainabilities RésuméAu cours des deux dernières décennies, les écologistes politiques ont fourni des critiques approfondies sur la privatisation, la marchandisation et la commercialisation de la nature, y compris des nouvelles formes d'accumulation et d'appropriation que cela pourrait faciliter sous l'aspect plus récent de la croissance verte et de l'économie verte. Ces critiques ont souvent démontré que de telles approches peuvent avoir des conséquences délétères pour certaines populations vulnérables à travers le monde en développement et audelà. À quelques exceptions près, cependant, les écologistes politiques ont accordé une attention nettement moins importante à l'élaboration d'autres initiatives visant à promouvoir à la fois la durabilité et la justice socio-environnementale. En conséquence, les contributions à cette Section Spéciale engagent explicitement le concept de l'économie verte comme un terrain de lutte, inévitablement conditionné par les formes variées que prennent les stratégies d'économie verte existantes dans des conjonctures historiques et géographiques 1 Connor Joseph Cavanagh, Prof. Tor Arve Benjaminsen,...

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Improvisational economies: Coltan production in the eastern Congo

Cited by 73 publications

References 25 publications

A Curious Trade: The Recovery and Repatriation of U.S. Missing In Action from the Vietnam War

A Curious Trade: The Recovery and Repatriation of U.S. Missing In Action from the Vietnam War

Civil Wars and the Right to Self-Determination

Political ecology, variegated green economies, and the foreclosure of alternative sustainabilities

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