Hybrid territorialisation: A reconfiguration of rural spaces through gold mining in Upper Guinea

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In this article, our aim is to analyse the process of territorialisation in the region of Upper Guinea following the rapid increase in gold mining exploitation since the 2000s. Territorialisation is analysed as a new way of doing space and creating boundaries in an area where boundaries have historically been negotiable and where artisanal and small-scale mining is plurisecular and gives rise to ephemeral spaces. Our first objective is to retrace changes in gold mining activities and spaces over the last decade, and to analyse the expansion of the mining industry as an extractive territorialisation, involving processes that lead to the fixation of the gold diggers’ mobility. Secondly, this article shows how this extractive territorialisation can in fact be analysed as a hybrid one, since it seems to lay the groundwork for state territorial control: first, it formalises spaces linked to and surrounding the exploitation area; second, it seems to correlate to a more general tendency of appropriation under the territorial model by local communities. Territorialisation, understood as both a political and a spatial process, serves thus as a starting point for the analysis of space formalisation in a peripheral region where the state is often seen by locals as mainly absent.