«Qui ne risque rien, n'a rein» : Conflict, Distributional Outcomes, and Property Rights in the Copper- and Cobalt -Mining Sector of the DRC.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Democratic Republic of Congo is rich in the copper and cobalt for which there is high demand on the world market.In southeastern DRC, large-scale mining (LSM) has a long history, with a recent resurgence following the end of the second civil war in 2003.This revival of LSM investment resulted in the displacement of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) by companies.These conflicts, which have received significant attention in academic literature and policymaking, are sometimes conceptualised as pitting LSM companies against artisanal miners in continuous conflict.Yet structural factors are necessary, but not sufficient to explain the variability of conflict at and around LSM sites.Here, I link conflict incidence to the interactions between three key facets of the property rights (PR) regime at and around LSM sites: corporate enforcement, authorised clandestine extraction, and unauthorised clandestine extraction.I contend that the property rights regime is characterised by overlapping claims that reflect the persistence of clandestine mining within LSM concessions, linked to the fact that outside actors push into the not-quite-hermetic space of the mine.Conflict often erupts in a context of strategic (c)overtness when the cost of providing PR and enforcing informal agreements becomes prohibitive for reasons indirectly linked to resource access, including security guards' need to protect their employment, and companies' reputational concerns.The different security forces that govern authorised clandestine mining also use a range of forceful and non-forceful tactics to "close" LSM sites to unpaid access by artisanal miners, but do not always succeed.The interactions of the different facets also have consequences in terms of the distribution of resources among a range of actors and groups including women, different categories of traders, and ethnic communities.This research highlights that corporate PR are in fact negotiated and contested: the public security forces and other government actors define and enforce other PR, not just companies' property rights, in contexts of "illegality".These findings provide a more fine-grained explanation for LSM-ASM conflict and why artisanal miners frequently operate peacefully at LSM sites, including through local conflict resolution mechanisms that reduce transaction costs hindering agreement.My findings have relevance for many other areas in resource-rich African countries where artisanal miners operate "illegally".
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".