The non-politics of abandonment: Resource extractivisim, precarity and coping in Tete, Mozambique

Abstract

This article relies on Jacque Rancière's theorisation of politics in order to explore the condition of precarity as a possibility of transformative politics in the resettlement site of Cateme created for populations dispossessed by capitalist enclosure for mining in Tete, Mozambique. Bringing the literature on precarity in relation to Rancière's understanding of politics, as well as ethnographic research on coping strategies the dispossessed populations employ to negotiate the conditions of precarity created by the dispossession, this article highlights the current impossibility of transformative politics in Cateme. It argues that, shaped by the state violence associated with the dispossession and the broader volatile political climate in Mozambique, the coping practices of the dispossessed population, such as the abandonment of the resettlement site, do not translate into transformative politics. Instead, they reconstitute the precarity created by the dispossession, thereby foreclosing the possibility of politics and not challenging the socio-material formations of the capitalist enclosure in Tete that produces precarity as a condition of life. Developing this argument, the article contributes to the literature on precarity, as well as to the scholarship on resistance in global politics more broadly, namely by demonstrating how this Rancièrean reading of precarity as a possibility of politics is important in order to avoid the potential danger of glorifying possibilities of contestation in contexts where conditions of liveable life are severely limited by socio-material orders created by capitalist enclosure.