'We have so many challenges': Small-scale mining, Covid-19 and constant interruptions in West Africa.

Abstract

Currently, the impacts of Covid‐19 are receiving significant global attention. This also applies to the extractive industries, where this global crisis is directing the gaze of policymakers, donors and academics alike. Covid‐19 is seen as having far‐reaching and disruptive consequences, especially in the case of artisanal and small‐scale mining. While the authors consider this attention important, their work on artisanal and small‐scale mining in Ghana – and West Africa more broadly – reveals that for many miners, Covid‐19 is ‘just’ another interruption to their lives and lifeworlds which are chronically affected by interruptions of different scales, magnitudes and temporalities. As anthropologists have shown, foregrounding this structural condition – which is emblematic for the lives of many people, especially in the Global South – is key to questioning, understanding and contextualizing the current moment of ‘global’ crisis and must be an element of any policy and research emerging from it.