Artisanal Mining: The Political Genealogy of a Regulatory Category in Africa

From the perspective of sub-Saharan Africa, this paper unpacks key moments in the making of “artisanal mining” as a global regulatory category. Today, the term “artisanal mining” refers to extractive activities that are informal, low-tech, and often illegal. Since the (now flagging) commodity boom of the early 2000s, both artisanal and corporate extraction has expanded exponentially in Africa. Under lobbying pressure from the global mining industry, African states have increasingly criminalized mining by citizens. Yet, at its origins, “artisanal mining” was never a straightforward technical classification. Rather, it emerged from the “customary rights” clauses of colonial-era mineral decrees that unequally divided mineral rights between colonial citizens (Europeans) and subjects (Africans). With the globalization of the mineral industry after World War II, the United Nations incorporated the category into policy recommendations for newly independent states, particularly in Africa. Considerable legal and political work, I argue, was invested in transforming a racialized partition of mineral rights into a naturalized “technical” category. This struggle is ongoing, as revealed by increasingly violent conflicts between artisanal and corporate miners across sub-Saharan Africa. This paper raises questions of broad interest to historians of law and post-colonialism. Under what conditions have the geographies of imperialism become re-inscribed in the regulation of “craft” and “artisanal” economies?