Mining and Development in Sierra Leone: Negotiating Change and Navigating Uncertainty [Hardcover]

This book?examines how different actors in Sierra Leone use the effects of large-scale mining to navigate the conditions of life. Of use to students and scholars working on resource extraction, large-scale investments, globalization, and development, as well as to development practitioners, mining professionals and policymakers.

This is a monograph about mining in Sierra Leone, but it is much more, and above all, it shows the power of theoretically informed, deep ethnography. Pijpers explores layers of history, from early colonization to the post-civil war era, political complexity past and present, gender relations and kinship, trust and its opposite, multilayered change and stubborn continuity. As a result, this book, on the face of it a study of resource extraction in West Africa, deserves a wide readership of scholars and students concerned to understand contemporary globalization, which is always localized. Often in places like Marampa, where uncertainty has to be navigated every day.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen, University of Oslo, Norway

Based on excellent scholarship, Robert Pijpers demonstrates how a focus on the micro-politics of extraction within the context of Sierra Leone can facilitate understanding of wider global processes related to the promises and pitfalls of extraction. Through the use of ethnography, a nuanced understanding emerges of how different interests, power relations and political strategies are tied to extractive resources, shaping peoples senses of belonging, hopes and expectations for better futures. A valuable contribution to the study of contemporary Africa, which I highly recommend.

Eleanor Fisher, Nordic Africa Institute, Sweden

Pijpers immersive ethnography captures the everyday struggles, tensions, aspirations, ambitions and disappointments of those livinls9