extractive industries imbrication: violence as pre-requisite

a talk by

Mark Harris

Today I want to discuss some of the ideas that inform the book that I'm working on, called Blood Minerals, and how it fits with the theme for this particular gathering. In Blood Minerals  I am looking at extractive industries and more particularly how violence that's imbricated in, seemingly almost a pre-requisite, of all extractive industries involves the violence against indigenous communities and communities of colour. Obviously, I won't be able to engage with all of the issues in the book so I would like to just frame the central argument: why is it that blood minerals continue to be productive of racialised violence - tracing from the colonial violence to the postcolonial moment (even though that's a contentious phrase). The second movement I'd like to do at the very end is to consider how we are all implicated in the violence of blood minerals. I look around and I see iPads, cell-phones, computers, all of which, as we will see, is part of the continuing violence. So my talk is essentially a consideration of the limitations and deficiencies of juridical responses to the human rights abuses that occur in the excavation of these blood minerals and the argument that human rights can only ever fail in any means of providing protection. 

           I'll start with Denise Ferreira da Silva talking about   the place where what should not happen to anybody happens every day. She asks:

                     Why is it that in so many places found in every corner of the global space so many human beings face that which no one deserves?                           What makes possible a mode of existence that spreads beyond the juridical borders of any given state any ethical orders of every                               nation.

Continuing from that theme, she articulates later on the idea that black and brown bodies can only ever be killed. What I am thinking about is: how is that we can comprehend the global moment which simultaneously proclaims the triumph of universal human rights - that voices which maintain that we now live in an age of rights.  There is no shortage of legal and human rights academics trumpeting the fact that rights have triumphed, Geoffrey Robertson for example. What I am arguing is: how do we then reconcile that with what we daily witness? What do we do about the catalogue, the tide, of violence that is perpetrated against marginalized and vulnerable communities?  Only last week, for example, it was reported - yet again - the deaths of indigenous environmental activists in Latin America. How do we think about that and reconcile with the lack of the law, or the failure of the law? Can we ask if this impotence of the law confirms the impossibility of human rights in these settings.  

          I have used the term 'blood minerals' to look at the extractive industries I am analyzing, a term somewhat borrowed from the phrase 'blood diamonds' that was coined when they created the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme to try to cut down the trade in illegal diamonds that were funding various conflicts areas. They're also called sometimes 'conflict minerals'. Since in my book I deal with oil as well, I could have also said blood minerals and devil's excrement (the description given to oil by Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso, a founder of OPEC, in 1975) because that's another way in which oil has been described in relation to what it does to the communities that it impacts upon. I'm thinking here of the tar sands in Alberta, the impact of oil exploration in the Niger Delta by Shell and the Chevron case in Ecuador, which I'll talk more about later. 

          The violence is, in each of the six sites that I discuss [in the book], is directed towards the most vulnerable and marginal communities, the indigenous communities, the black and brown bodies. The violence is both direct and indirect, there are dislocation and removal of vulnerable communities and indeed various global agencies such as the World Bank prepare and distribute documents that speak to the guidelines for the relocation of vulnerable communities. It is the poisoning of the environment that is a continuing element of the colonial, thus, in Native American communities where the uranium mines have been exhausted, there still is the legacy of the toxic imperialism. There's the creation of waste dumps of toxic material, the impact upon the health of neighbouring communities and  with it the gendered racial violence that occurs from the mining communities that are built in proximity to indigenous communities.

          As I said, I would like to trace the continuities between the colonial and the postcolonial and to begin that, I've chosen to draw from Eduardo Galeano’s eloquent , The Open Veins of Latin America, if I can just borrow from him for a moment: "the Latin American colonies were discovered, conquered, and colonized within the process of expansion of commercial capital. Europe stretched out its arms to clasp the whole world. The rape of accumulated treasure was followed by the systematic exploitation of the forced labor of Indians and abducted Africans in the mines". A point he makes further in this same chapter resonates with the contemporary moment: "While metals flowed unceasingly from Latin American mines, equally unceasing were the orders from the Spanish Court granting paper protection and dignity to the Indians whose killing labor sustained the kingdom. The fiction of legality protected the Indians; the reality of exploitation drained the blood from his body".

         I would maintain that we can trace Galeano’ sentiments as a continuing theme or leitmotif in extractive industries globally into this day. Whilst my focus is upon the extractive industry's minerals, Galeano makes the point that the same sort of violence occurs, for example, in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, the scramble for rubber in the Belgium Congo, and then tobacco. A whole range of resources to be found in the new world occasioned the violence that was brought to bear. 

         In this we also follow from Patrick Wolfe who talks about settler-colonial violence as that which requires the continuous physical and symbolic removal of indigenous peoples from the land. That is, a settler-society necessitates, for example, ongoing invasion and with that we have the catalogue of processes of removal, genocide, apartheid, miscegenation, and assimilation, all structured around what Wolfe terms the“logic of elimination”. It is this logic that I would like to further consider.  Wolfe further argues that settler-colonialism is always more than just the temporal moment of violence or invasion but rather it is a continuing structure. So the logic of elimination (or to put it more definitively the “logic of obliteration” outlined by Ferreira da Silva) remains as an enduring constituent element to settler colonialism. Paradoxically, however, it must accommodate modernity and the liberal subject articulating  principles of rights. It is this constant tension between a gesture towards accommodating difference through rights and the abiding instinctual settler-colonial imperative towards obliteration that marks the space of the persona nullius.

        The modes of displacement and dispossession we are talking about in relation to resource extractivism are therefore interwoven into the current global condition in accumulation processes that Bobby Banerjee has termed 'necrocapitalism'. It involves what he maintains as specific capitalist practices of modes of organization- accumulation that involves dispossession, death, torture, suicide, slavery, destruction of livelihoods, and general organization and management of violence. It's, put in another way by David Harvey, who speaks of accumulation by dispossession as effectively a continuance of Marx's original formulation of the idea of primitive accumulation. What I am sketching out are the linkages, the continuities, the idea that the colonial never really ended, even when the colonial powers moved back to the metropolitan center, you can see re-articulations or reconfigurations of the same modes of violence.

         Now, why don’t human rights work? The problem, I believe, and I wanted to give a really short answer: you have a whole plethora of international treaties and instruments; the Inter American Commission on Human Rights, or the African Charter on Human and Peoples' rights, the Declaration of Rights of Man to name but a few examples. Despite the fact that we have all of these instruments and bodies I would suggest they are more notable for their lack of enforceability then anything else. That's the international level and I bear in mind the fact that Anthony Anghie makes the really pertinent point that international law proceeded from and actually facilitates/d imperialism. So, it is unsurprising that you have the colonial moment that still occasions the dispossession of what we might call the Global South or the Third World. It was always predicated on that idea of the Global South being the source of mineral riches and wealth. At the domestic level, why is, then, that the national laws don't work? If we can say that international law is always going to be limited and deficient, we do have domestic laws to protect the rights of indigenous peoples or people, either as citizens rights or specifically enactment of indigenous rights. There is quite simply the impossibility of justice in/through the law.

         What I am thinking about here is the point made very pertinently by Peter Fitzpatrick: that the people for whom human rights legislation is drafted are never intended to be the beneficiaries of those same laws. Rather they operate as a salve to the liberal conscience of the western nations. And, even where the laws are articulated or are passed, there's a whole raft of examples whereby those particular, specific measures are violated or terminated or hold in abeyance. For example: in 2008, Ecuador passed a new constitution. It recognized, belatedly, indigenous peoples. In article 84 it maintains that;“the state shall recognize and guarantee indigenous peoples rights in conformity with the constitution, law, human rights, and collective rights. This was seen by many as a landmark moment for the then president, Rafael Correa and  Ecuador’s Indigenoous peoples.  Not long after that however mineral and mining leases were put on the market to be bided for over the lands of indigenous peoples. So you have, to return back to Galeano, simultaneously the protection of paper rights and the return to (or resurrection of) violence that it is still occurring in the Amazon. 

          It's no little wonder then that Eric Posner has said that human rights and the whole body of treaties, communities, state reports, and individual complaint make very little difference to the suffering community - those black and brown bodies and the indigenous communities. Makua Mathua points to the fact that human rights follow from western liberal articulation that's been imposed upon the rest of the world and here is the crux of my argument about human rights: they presume and argue for a notion of universality that's blatantly and profoundly false. So, the Asian and African scholars of human rights will maintain and argue that it was created in the guise of the western liberal subject in the interests of western or global north nations. And, Matua makes the point that international human rights law can only ever conceive of its interventions and its application to the African nations in terms of the savage, the victim, and the saviour. In this, you see a continuance of the same sort of discourse that informs the doctrine of discovery and terra nulius, the idea of the others, of the racial others of Europe, as not been able to be human. In thinking of this chimeric dimension to human rights as that which supposedly which rescues the oppressed populations of African nations I am drawn to think of how Homi Bhabha characterises the introduction of “the Word” in text in the colonial moment, ostensibly as that which is a signifier of bringing light (enlightenment) yet in fact, what it produces (I think the phrase he uses is Entstellung) is displacement, distortion and darkness. 

          The promise of human rights fails and it is this failure that returns me to the  term to describe the bodies that are promised rights only for them to always remain unattainable and illusory - persona nullius. Why is it that those bodies can be dispossessed? I am not solely talking now about biological extermination, which was such a hallmark of the colonial moment, and that it still occurs - routinely you will see cattle ranchers in Brazil killing indigenous communities, you will still see violence being perpetrated against indigenous Australians in central Australia. But what I am talking about is the other ways in which the legal rights can somehow be voided. So, the various strategies rendered the person, invariably their traditional lands, the lands they have a connection with, where the mining takes place, can somehow be obscurated, erased, or suspended as it occurred in Australia in other occasions. So, there isn't a refusal of a legal entity but what I would like to think about is how the courts construct the appearance of justice. Thus, many of the cases I look at in 'Blood Minerals' talk about long protracted legal proceedings -often in other jurisdictions. Yet invariably these cases heard in other nations do not produce justice. Often there is no juridical determination and equally importantly they confirm that the voices of the communities affected cannot be heard in the court room –they remain always persona nullius. The voices that can be heard in these cases often are those from the global north - the lawyers who represent the communities in Ecuador, for example.  

          In the cases I've looked at there is often collusion between the State and Transnational corporations. In Nigeria, for example, there is the continuing struggle of the Ogoni people against the Nigerian govern and Shell. I think Shell spent in the years 2007 and 2009, and this is speaking out of memory*, 40% of its $ 1 billion dollars in security on Nigeria alone to protect its resource. What you see repeatedly emerging is the confluence, the manner in which corporations effectively govern states. In Papua New Guinea, similarly, you have the example of the mining company drafting legislation once there was an environmental disaster in Ok Tedi to declare that any person bringing a lawsuit against the company would commit an offence. The lawyers of the guilty corporation, BHP, actually drafted that legislation. In Ecuador multiple cases laboured through the courts for nearly two decades in an oil spill that was  described as the 'Chernobyl of the Amazon' - with little prospect of ever being any resolution for the communities. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly the Belgium Congo) you still see echoes of the violence  described in the nineteenth century in the Casement report, the Conan Doyle report, and in the fiction of Joseph Conrad’s  'Heart of Darkness'. Here now we talk about the so-called 'conflict minerals' of  Coltan,Tin, Tungston, and Titanium, all which go up to make out much of our electronic devices. 

         That's the point I am talking about - the complicity. How do we actually understand the way we are imbricated within the whole violence of and dispossession and displacement? I also think about the campaign of senior Aboriginal women, the Kungka Tjuta, in South Australia, the Iriti Wanti trying to stop radioactive waste dump from being put on their lands that they have been granted title over. And similarly in India, the struggle of the Dongria Kond  tribe in Odisha* state in Eastern India to stop the mining of a sacred hill by the Vedanta Corporation. What I find from the discussion of each of those sites is routinely the same question: where is the law? The law of the domestic nations is routinely either complicit in the violence or impotent in the face of the power of the Transnational Corporations. In Nigeria for example, Shell were found guilty by the Nigerian Supreme Court for the harm caused by gas flaring and fined .In response Shell simply said that they would not pay  - and they did not.

          The lethal violence that I mentioned before is a consistent thing. With this follows the he mobilization of security forces against communities to ensure access to the resources are confirmation of the manner in which a national interest can be proclaimed to trump and erase the rights. It has occurred in the Philippines,  where the belated recognition of indigenous rights is followed, almost inevitably, by the passage of legislation to ensure that a particular resource extractive project can proceed. The same thing occurs in India with the construction of special economic zones whether the domestic law is actually in effect suspended and it becomes almost a state within a state to facilitate neo-liberal access to particular resources. And the last point is declaring the failed state. In there, you see a continuance of the whole discourse of the savage that Mutua is talking about. These states are constructed as, in the eyes of the Global North, ‘failed’. So therefore they are basically outside the purview, they are outside global civil society, and that justifies taking the minerals but in no way, shape, or form making attempts to control or regulate the scramble for resources akin to that which Conrad or described in the Belgium Congo in Africa in the 19th century. 

          How do we get to persona nullius? The point, for me, is to move beyond the idea that there is any possibility for some sort of interventionist rewriting of international law. Put simply it seems such a rewriting is only ever going to proceed from the bodies of knowledge that framed international (human rights) law in the first place. That is why I am drawn to the work, in the first instance, of Silvya Winter who argues that we have to get back 500 years probably, or more than 500 years, and the articulation of the human and humanity. She makes the point and talks about the way in which you actually have the lay world's invention of man as a political subject of the state. To quote her:

                 "in the transumed and reoccupied place of its earlier matrix identity Christian, the performative enactment of this new “descriptive                              statement” and its master code of symbolic life and death, as the first secular or “degodded” (if, at the time, still only partly so) mode of                    being human".

What Wynter maintains is that the only way you can unsettle this coloniality of power is effectively to perform a re-description of the human outside the terms of the present configuration of the human, man, and its overrepresentation. Thus, what I have been moving to, sort of saying how can we do that, I would maintain, borrowing from Ferreira da Silva is the ontoepistemological impossibility; the fact that the Old World can't comprehend the racial other of Europe. In this it is not just exclusion or exceptionalism as Patrick Wolfe might have it, but rather it is something that has only ever been part of the way in which the globe, the old world has conceived of itself. With that I am talking about a Universality that can't comprehend the bodies of the black and brown, the indigenous bodies. Therefore, there is the tension between enacting liberal values that (belatedly) seeks to recognize them in the lexicon of human rights - but it's only ever a spurious or artificial distinction because at the base of it is remains that ontoepistemological impossibility. The no-bodies have to always be the no-bodies, but if the nobodies are there they have to be constructed as persona nullius so that the violence that occurs, in the instance of resource extraction, can be justified. 

          That, in essence, is my argument with regards to the access to resource extraction. It's not just a series of singular moments, it actually is the continuation of the thought that writes the resources as always available and the bodies that represent an impediment to accessing the body as only ever possible to be killed, deploying the arsenal of raciality. So, then, the question is what do we do? If the law so patently has failed in its most fundamental premise, that the law routinely will only ever produce and gestures towards acknowledgment and in doing so confirm the subordinate nature of those other communities, those marginalized communities, what's to be done? And the other part that follows from that, that I'd like to think about is how do we think beyond the connectivities of resource mineral extraction, beyond the universality that is imposed from the west, inflicted by the western lens of human rights law? A further example of how human rights can be seen as a construct preceding from post-enlightenment thought can be gleaned from Joseph Slaughter’s Human Rights, Inc.. Slaughter talks about the fact that the confluence, the parallels between the rise of the modern novel and human rights law because they both articulate a particular form of the modern individual liberal subject. In that moment, the individual western liberal subject simultaneously can't comprehend (and has never comprehended) the racial other of Europe. Put simply it is an   ontological impossibility.

         With that, how do we consider our complicity in the extraction and consumption of these blood minerals and what do we do if the law is so demonstrably limited?  I want to consider in conclusion the alternative ways of seeing the violence of blood minerals through the lens of art – and how we might comprehend them differently (and outside the juridical framing).  Specifically I thinking of two moments; – the work of a Nigerian artist, Otobong Nkanga, who is based in Berlin an exhibition that I visited recently in Eindhoven at the MU Art Space titled Avant Tout, Discipline (http://www.mu.nl/en/txt/avant-tout-discipline) and also and want to show some images from those particular two exhibitions simply because what I am thinking about here is how do we make sense of the global condition and more importantly how do the artists in these exhibitions speak to the same questions of the global condition and the violence of blood minerals that concerns me.  So I want to consider a number of questions. What is the correlation between the environmental decay and the displacement of peoples?. Do we know what and where our processed products will come from? And what kinds of exploitations in labor are taking place just to have a piece of metal? Firstly I want to consider the images by Otobong Nkanga to be found in the publication Luster and Lucre and her exhibitions which trace the enduring nature of the violence in the extractive industries and maps their connections from Nigeria, Namibia and other locations and their ultimate destination in the markets of the Global North. Nkanga juxtaposes the violence inflicted upon the landscape in the series of photographs showing mining extraction in Namibia against the allure of the materials produced – the bling that is so much sought in the markets and consumer goods of Western society and depicted in her 2014 print “In pursuit of bling”. Beyond documenting the nature of environmental damage done in extracting minerals Nkanga also tracks connections and synergies – she shows the mining of copper from Namibia, the minerals themselves in all their glittering allure and then a series of photographs of the copper-clad (now green with passage of time) spires of churches in Europe. Importantly Nkanga appears in the foreground of the photographs, wearing a headpiece that mimics the colour and shape of the spire.  The transit of the materials is continued – the materials (and bodies) that are removed and displaced by the resource extraction come to occupy (perhaps only fleetingly) the space of the metropolitan centre. The distinction between the colonies as the source and the centre as beneficiaries is blurred and the violence is brought home – if not for reckoning at least for acknowledgment.          

         The other exhibition titled Avant Tout, Discipline by the artist/film makers Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen comprises three parts – all of which relate to the mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where much of the world’s minerals for cell phones, playstations and other electronic items is mined. The first part of the exhibition comprises various pieces of cell phones and tablets that have been dissembled, surrounding a central piece of reconstituted metal (which could be an amalgam of any of the minerals such as coltan, cassiterite, tin and gold), followed by a series of printed gauze printed of several metres in height and four to five metres in width featuring landscapes from the film that forms the central part of the exhibition. Titled “Trapped in the Dream of the Other” the film shows the transport of specially (as the catalogue terms it) bespoke fireworks that are placed in the landscape of a working coltan mine in the DRC. The detonation and recording of the fireworks is a complex and technical exercise is described in Eva Wilson’s catalogue that can be viewed from the link to the exhibition above. Even though there is acknowledgment in Wilson’s essay of the “militant land grabs, an immense increase of violence, rape, and killings, mass displacement, destruction of agriculture, and lastingly devastating social effects” the film itself gives no inkling of the violences – save for the vision showing the ravages on the landscape itself. We are told instead that;

          Trapped in the Dream of the Other does not aim to represent the reality of the DRC or the conditions in the mines. The film by Cohen and Van Balen is rather the result of an endeavour to retro-engineer the global trade routes that delineate the bridge between Sub-Saharan Africa and China via extraction and the manufacture of electronics. It is the documentation of a performance whose main interest and unease is a lack of answers and a failed attempt at orientation within this entanglement.

         In this there might be said to be a link to the work of Nkanga in the tracing, tracking and subverting the nature of resource minerals as global commodities. Yet the danger for me   of Trapped in the Dream of the Other is that it becomes the event that is such a staple of the Western commodity lifestyle that is performed routinely in the space of social media on those self-same devices. The bodies of the workers carrying and positioning the fireworks for the event presents them as the labour – divorced from the tableau being performed. In this they are occupying the same space as the unnamed bodies that perform the labour most of the time in the same landscape, gouging out the minerals. There is, in short, a dissonance between the recognition of the violence(s) of conflict minerals in the Wilson essay and a reading/viewing of the film itself. So, I'll finish just with the question (with which I started) of what's to be done since the law doesn't provide a path forward? Can art and other modes of representation make a difference?  Following from this,  how can we make those connections, how do we denounce, how do we acknowledge the violence that is routinely occurring, how do we counter the repeated and almost inevitable embodiment of the nobodies and the violence against those nobodies? Most importantly we need to ask if the stories of resource extraction is to be told and to change the global condition who should be the ones telling the story and  assembling the counter-narratives.

Mark Harris, Alyosha Goldstein, Renisa Mawani Q&A

Avan tout, discipline

trapped in the dream of the other