Whose underground? Entangled territorialization and mining cooperatives in eastern Congo’s gold frontier

Abstract

This article uses the term ‘entangled territorialization’ to assess the active role of mining cooperatives in manipulating the access to natural resources in a context of limited state authority. The case study at hand, which concerns the ‘discovery’ of gold deposits in Luhihi, Democratic Republic of Congo in 2020, discusses the contrasting capabilities of two mining cooperatives, COOMIUKI, and COMILU, to position themselves as ‘quasi-state actors’ in a fragmented landscape of artisanal and small-scale gold mining formalization. The paper’s main contributions are twofold. First, it shows how mining cooperatives actively teritorialize the access to gold desposits due to their central role in the social relations of production. Second, it demonstrates that mining cooperatives are important players who, in specific circumstances, are able to influence the spatial organization of natural resource extraction and marketization in important ways.