The Democratic Republic of Congo: From Stones in the River to Diving for Dollars

Abstract

In this chapter, we describe different gold mining crystallizations in Eastern DRC, tracing their shapes to historical/institutional and geographical/ecological environments. We see them not as path-dependent outcomes of a shaken colonial and post-colonial history, but as crystals, emerging out of contingent arrangements of atoms, in the form of labor, capital, technology, and land arrangements. Theoretically, our chapter speaks to two main arguments of this book. First, it depicts informalization as an increasing reliance on cheap, flexible labor and a state apparatus that takes a step back from its regulatory and distributional obligations. Second, the way in which ASGM and industrial gold mining evolve together and in response to one another testifies of them being part of one global gold production system.