A sovereign grant and a franchised state: Tin mineral supply chains in south Kivu of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In resource extraction regions, nation-states tend to be depicted as the legal authority sanctioning profitable mining operations in close collaboration with corporate actors in their domestic territories. Especially in post-colonial contexts, corporate sovereignty is the term deployed by anthropologists to depict the acts of power by legally sanctioned corporate actors within a space of negotiation authorised by the state. A problem arises with this framing of sovereignty in contexts where the international norms of liberal democracy and development are violated due to constraints on the domestic authority of the state. In this scenario, the international order imposes itself to restore the authority of the state by governmentalising the security, territory, and market access of the state. Through ethnographic and field survey research in south Kivu of eastern Congo, I argue that the restoration and extension of state authority is a grant given to the state on condition of the responsible exercise of norms and practices of international markets. The tin, tantalum and tungsten (3T) mineral supply chain in south Kivu are an example of such a grant extended by international market actors and their related resource policy regimes to strengthen the state by franchising its apparatuses through practical mechanisms and discourse aimed at implementing traceability of so-called conflict minerals. Here, sovereignty is a position that is made by international market rule delivered through infrastructure in the form of 3T-mineral supply chains that franchise the state with the aim of optimising its fiscal reach and penetration among upstream mineral producers in south Kivu.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".