Extractive Industries and Changing State Dynamics in Africa

Beyond the Resource Curse

Jon Schubert, Ulf Engel, Elísio Macamo, Jon Schubert, Ulf Engel, Elísio Macamo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351200615
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book uses extractive industry projects in Africa to explore how political authority and the nation-state are reconfigured at the intersection of national political contestations and global, transnational capital. Instead of focusing on technological zones and the new social assemblages at the actual sites of construction or mineral extraction, the authors use extractive industry projects as a topical lens to investigate contemporary processes of state-making at the state–corporation nexus.

Throughout the book, the authors seek to understand how public political actors and private actors of liberal capitalism negotiate and redefine notions and practices of sovereignty by setting legal, regulatory and fiscal standards. Rather than looking at resource governance from a normative perspective, the authors look at how these negotiations are shaped by and reshape the self-conception of various national and transnational actors, and how these jointly redefine the role of the state in managing these processes for the 'greater good'. Extractive Industries and Changing State Dynamics in Africa will be useful for researchers, upper-level students and policy-makers who are interested in new articulations of state-making and politics in Africa.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• About the contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Boom and bust: extractive industries and African states in the twenty-first century
• 1. Africa’s re-enchantment with big infrastructure: White elephants dancing in virtuous circles?
• 2. Port geographies: Africa’s infrastructure boom and the reconfiguration of power and authority
• 3. The ‘blue economy’ and Operation Phakisa: Prospects for an emerging developmental state in South Africa?
• 4. The dynamics and processes involved in the emergence of participatory mining codes in Cameroon
• 5. The politics of LNG: Local state power and contested demands for land acquisitions in Palma, Mozambique
• 6. A radical mineral policy with retribalisation? Mining and politics of difference in rural South Africa
• 7. The local state in a new mining area in Zambia’s Northwestern Province
• 8. Political legacies in Ghana’s petroleum industry
• Conclusion: The political ecology of the state
• Index