The overall aim of this research project is to achieve a better understanding of the relationship between green extractivism and politics, with a specific focus on the provinces of Lualaba and Haut-Katanga in the heart of the Congolese Copperbelt. The central research question is: How do green extractivism and green extractivist populism connect, and how do they manifest in the Copperbelt? Our focus will be on the period from the mid-2010s onwards, as this was when Congolese cobalt and copper started becoming central to the global green transition. There are three reasons why we believe our project is highly innovative. First of all, crucial aspects of the political consequences of green extractivism in the Global South remain underexplored. We still have limited knowledge about how the increased extraction of raw materials for the green transition impacts domestic politics in countries like the DRC, and how domestic political dynamics, in turn, shape this extraction. Second, there is still relatively little research on the (relative) absence of environmental protest against green extractivism in certain parts of the Global South. Third, Sub-Saharan Africa has so far been somewhat neglected in the enormously growing literature about populism over the past decade. Until now, most populism experts have focused their attention primarily on the various manifestations of this phenomenon in the United States, Europe and South America. A case study about green extractivist populism in the Congolese Copperbelt can significantly advance our knowledge of the role of populism in African politics.
Objective 1. To understand the relationship between green extractivism and green extractivist populism in the Congolese Copperbelt How does populism manifest itself in Congolese politics? (RQ1); How do Congolese leaders at the provincial and local levels engage in extractive bargains to convince their constituents of their views on the role of Congolese minerals in the green transition? (RQ2); How do Congolese citizens respond to the attempts of Congolese leaders to win popular support for their resource policies? (RQ3)
Objective 2. To explain the relative absence of environmental protest against green extractivism in the Congolese Copperbelt Which strategies do government and corporate actors use to deal with critics of green extractivism? (RQ4); What role does the region’s mining history play in the extractive subjectivities of Copperbelt residents (RQ5); How do Copperbelt residents express their ideas and emotions about green extractivism? (RQ6)
Working hypothesis: One of the key insights of the literature on populism is that populist leaders tend to capitalize on a sense of emergency, which they use to win popular support. They usually do this by creating an external enemy and by presenting themselves as saviors of the “common people” and giving the impression of being capable of taking decisive action to put an end to the emergency. At the time of writing, the Congolese part of the Copperbelt is facing a double crisis. First, there is the major security crisis in the eastern part of the country, where the Rwandan-backed rebel movement M23 has taken over two major provincial towns. The developments in eastern DRC have considerably weakened the position of President Tshisekedi, who is now trying to save his political skin by announcing negotiations with Trump on a raw materials deal in exchange for military support (analogous to the Ukraine deal). This creates a great deal of uncertainty in the Katangese mining industry. Second, the Congolese government has decided to suspend the export of cobalt for a period of 4 months, citing an oversupply at the global level as the main reason for its decision. By introducing this ban, the government is trying to stabilize the cobalt price and, in doing so, attempting to prevent a strategic sector of its economy from collapsing. We hypothesize that green extractivist populism will intensify during these times of crisis. Given that the Katangese mining industry is perceived to be under threat, we expect that Congolese political leaders at the provincial and local levels will try to boost their own popularity by presenting themselves as defenders of the regional mineral wealth against external enemies, including environmental defenders. The space for criticizing green extractivism and its environmental impact is likely to become even smaller than it already was.
Conceptual framework: This project will rely on different conceptual building blocks. First, drawing inspiration from the work of populism scholars following the ideational approach, we will treat green extractivist populism as a thin-centered ideology that attaches itself to other, more comprehensive ideologies that serve as hosts. The host ideology that we expect to play the biggest role is resource nationalism. Resource nationalism refers to claiming sovereignty over a country’s national resources. From the extensive literature on resource nationalism, we know that it is inherently cyclical: every now and then governments in the extractive peripheries can - or need - “to renegotiate how they are incorporated in the global capitalist system” (Kaup & Gellert 2017: 5). Both Tshisekedi’s plans for a mineral deal with Trump and the temporary ban on cobalt exports illustrate this cyclical nature of resource nationalism quite well. A second building block in our conceptual framework is the notion of extractive bargains, which Bowler and Andrews define as “(….) the ways in which states attempt to convince different stakeholders and seek to establish some degree of consensus with societal actors about the need to pursue particular policies on resource extraction” (2023: 6). The advantage of using this analytical lens is that it ties in well with our ambition to conduct a bi-directional analysis of green extractivist populism, paying attention to both the strategies of Congolese politicians and the ideas and emotions of Congolese citizens. Third, for the analysis of expressions of environmental protest and strategies of corporate and state actors to curb such protest, we will use the concepts of resigned activism, (corporate) counterinsurgency and extractive subjectivities. Lora-Wainwright (2017) has coined the concept of “resigned activism” to highlight that for some of the victims of environmental pollution the two seemingly contradictory attitudes of resignation and activism are more closely connected than one would assume. In the Congolese Copperbelt, we also expect to find such mixed feelings and reactions amongst our research participants: on the one hand, a tendency to accept mining-induced pollution as a fact of life, on the other hand, a tendency to engage in what Scott has famously called “everyday forms of resistance”. Both the Congolese state and mining companies on Congolese soil use many of the hard and soft techniques that have been described and analyzed at length in the anthropological and political ecological literature on environmental activism and corporate counterinsurgency. The final building block in our conceptual framework is the notion of extractive subjectivities, defined by Verweijen et al. (2024: 1) as “a process involving the development of particular senses of selfhood among the inhabitants of resource frontiers as well as their subjection (or not) to the power of extractive corporations or extractive projects more broadly”. Through the use of this concept, we want to investigate how Copperbelt residents develop a sense of self while living in one of the world’s most important hotspots of green extractivism.