In this proposed double session, we invite submissions of papers which explore Madagascar’s many landscapes of extraction. We aim to move away from a damage-centered approach to studying extraction in the Global South, and from normative understandings of extraction centrally focused on circuits of capital and resource exploitation. We instead seek to illuminate Madagascar’s landscapes of extraction through multi-faceted attention to that which is material and immaterial, human and nonhuman, organic and synthetic, local and global, violent and generative. As a group of interdisciplinary scholars, themes explored in this session include:
-The medicalized, reproductive body as a site of extraction
-Transnational and local/regional politics of production and reproduction amid overlapping climate change and public health crises
- Pharmaceutical resources and contestations of health/medicine across scales
- Complexities of knowing, inhabiting, and governing forested, cultivated, or mined landscapes
Adding to these themes, we invite papers across disciplines who broadly explore relations of extraction, materialities, and governmentalities across Madagascar. We wish to especially invite Malagasy scholars and researchers who examine or interrogate these themes in their work.

TITLE: BEYOND ENCLOSURE: STRATEGIES OF EXPLOITATION AND ACCUMULATION IN MADAGASCAR'S MINERAL COMMONS

Abstract: This paper uses a political ecology approach to examine strategies of exploitation and accumulation in Madagascar’s artisanal and small-scale gold mining sector. Goldfields on the island are often managed and maintained as mineral commons (Klein, forthcoming), where miners and mining communities engage in varying forms of collective self-governance. While many gold-bearing landscapes have historically been and continue to be targeted by state-corporate extractors, the socially-embedded and historically-sedimented nature of artisanal gold extraction often render physical processes of enclosure and exclusion by external concession-holders largely impracticable, for both socio-cultural and techno-geological reasons. Faced with such conditions, corporate representatives, government officials, and a range of political-economic elites have been forced to look beyond enclosure as they navigate local politics in pursuit of gold and attendant riches. Drawing on archival and ethnographic evidence gathered in the gold-mining region of Betsiaka in Madagascar’s far north, I argue that state-corporate actors and other political-economic elites have manipulated the forms and leadership structures of governance institutions; dispute mediation processes; sponsorship arrangements; share distribution systems; narratives and relations of ownership and belonging; and socio-cultural expectations around extraversion (Bayart 2000) in order to exploit miners’ labor and accumulate gold-based wealth. At the same time, local miners have resisted these attempts, further (re)producing the goldfields as a contested landscape of both oppressive and autonomous possibilities.

Keywords: artisanal and small-scale gold mining; mineral commons; resource governance