Constraints, opportunities and hope: Artisanal gold mining and trade in South Kivu (DRC)

Abstract

The dominant discourse on mineral resources and local livelihoods in the DRC emphasises people’s constraints. For most, the exploitation of mineral riches does not contribute to improved livelihoods; small diggers are forced by master traders and/or armed groups to work in the mines, with the profits from mineral exploitation and trade flowing to criminal networks (Global Witness, 2004, 2005, 2009; Pole Institute and International Alert, 2004; Human Rights Watch, 2005; NiZA, 2006; Prendergast and Lezhnev, 2009; Enough, 2009; Sullivan and Atama, 2010). This discourse, accepted in international policy circles and by the media, fails to grasp the more complex local realities. This chapter offers an agency perspective, focusing on people’s opportunities and the way they deal with them. Agency-oriented sociologists view human beings as social agents capable of solving problems, taking decisions and intervening in the social world around them. Therefore, ‘the notion of agency attributes to the individual actor a capacity to process social experience and to devise ways of coping with life, even under the most extreme forms of coercion’ (Long, 2001: 16).