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From Sudan and Sierra Leone to Eritrea, Angola, Congo, Botswana, and postwar Tigray, the struggle over gold and minerals reveals a recurring lesson: resources do not determine political outcomes, but where institutions are weak, extraction often becomes the new arena where power is contested, consolidated, and sustained.
The road into Tigray’s gold country passes through landscapes that have not finished absorbing the last war. Craters remain in the earth. Abandoned settlements sit beside new mining pits. The geography is no longer only a record of violence. It is becoming a record of extraction.
What looks like recovery is also a redistribution of power.
Gold has become the axis around which postwar authority now turns. Former fighters, military networks, brokers, and external actors compete over access to land, machinery, and trade routes. As shown in Claire Wilmot’s reporting on Tigray’s gold rush, extraction is already reshaping the region’s postwar geography, linking mining sites, informal economies, and contested authority into a single emerging system.
The economy that emerges is not separate from politics. It is politics reorganized around value in the ground.
This argument builds on earlier work examining Ethiopia’s shift from revolutionary developmentalism toward market-oriented reform, particularly the changing role of the state in managing accumulation and political authority, as discussed in the ROAPE analysis of Ethiopia’s political economy.
This is not an accident of reconstruction. It is a recurring political condition.
Theory
Natural resource wealth does not automatically produce conflict. It becomes politically decisive when institutions are weak, fragmented, or contested at the moment extraction begins.
As political economist Michael T. Klare argues in Resource Wars, contemporary conflicts are increasingly shaped by competition over strategic materials rather than ideology alone.
Resources are not passive commodities. They are instruments of power. Gold, diamonds, cobalt, copper, oil, and rare earth minerals therefore do not simply enrich societies. They reorganize them.
Sudan
Nowhere is this clearer than in Sudan. Gold is not external to conflict. It has become part of the conflict’s operating system. As documented by Chatham House, mining revenues are deeply embedded in competing military networks and help sustain rival armed forces.
Gold in this context is not simply wealth. It is endurance for armed power. Control over mines becomes control over military capacity, and military capacity becomes the means of securing mines.
Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone offers an earlier and more contained version of this logic. During the civil war, diamonds shaped territorial control. Armed groups organized themselves around alluvial mining sites where access to pits and riverbeds determined survival as much as battlefield success.
The blood diamond economy exposed by Global Witness revealed how fragmented conflict zones can plug into global demand chains that prioritize supply over origin.
Resource-driven conflict does not require complete state collapse. It emerges wherever extraction is loosely governed and globally demanded.
Eritrea
Eritrea illustrates a different configuration of extraction. Unlike in Sudan or Sierra Leone, extraction in Eritrea is structured through centralized political authority.
The Bisha mine, developed with Nevsun Resources, became internationally controversial after allegations of coercive conscript labour under Eritrea’s national service system. The case later reached the Supreme Court of Canada in Nevsun Resources Ltd. v. Araya.
Eritrea shows that resource politics is shaped not only by war, but also by how labour and extraction are controlled.
Congo
The Democratic Republic of the Congo represents a deeper and more durable form of this dynamic.
With vast reserves of cobalt, copper, gold, and coltan, it remains one of the most resource-rich territories in the world. Yet extraction is embedded in long-running instability involving armed groups, neighbouring states, and global supply chains.
As noted by the World Bank, resource dependence is tightly intertwined with governance challenges. Authority shifts toward whoever controls access to minerals. Governance becomes management of extraction rather than provision of public goods.
Botswana
Botswana is often cited as a counterexample. Diamond discoveries occurred after independence, but unlike many postcolonial states, Botswana had relatively consolidated authority before large-scale extraction began.
Under Seretse Khama, diamonds were centralized as a national asset rather than dispersed among competing factions. Through partnerships with Debswana and De Beers, revenues were integrated into national development planning, as reflected in the World Bank’s Botswana overview.
The absence of armed fragmentation meant extraction strengthened the state rather than fuelling conflict.
Botswana clarifies the broader pattern: resources become destabilizing not on their own, but when they enter fragmented political orders.
Angola
Angola illustrates a different trajectory. During the civil war, diamonds financed UNITA while oil sustained the government. Resources prolonged conflict while also structuring competing systems of power.
After the war, oil became central to state consolidation but also concentrated wealth within a narrow elite. Angola’s political economy remains deeply shaped by oil dependence, as analyzed by the Natural Resource Governance Institute.
Angola shows that the end of war does not end resource politics. It transforms it into postwar consolidation.
Liberation
Liberation movements begin with moral clarity and collective struggle. But transition to governance changes the logic of power.
The tools that enable victory in war often harden into centralized authority. Over time, liberation becomes state permanence, and state permanence becomes difficult to dislodge.
Power concentrates. Institutions weaken. Resources become entangled with authority.
Power and Resources
Gold accelerates this trajectory. It is valuable, mobile, difficult to trace, and easily converted into political and military capacity. Control over extraction sites expands political power itself.
These dynamics do not remain local. Minerals move through trading hubs and financial networks that absorb uncertainty about origin in exchange for supply continuity. A key intermediary role is played by brokers, refiners, and logistics networks.
Among the most consequential hubs is the United Arab Emirates, a major centre in global gold trade. Large volumes of African gold pass through it before entering global markets, often with limited traceability, as reported by Reuters investigations.
The UAE functions not as an extractor but as a converter of fragmented supply into liquid global assets.
The point is not conspiracy. It is structure. Demand does not eliminate violence. It often passes through it.
Tigray
Tigray sits at an earlier but recognizably similar stage. After the war, gold mining has expanded under reconstruction narratives. Yet weak oversight and fragmented authority have limited institutional control over extraction.
Under the postwar conditions of Abiy Ahmed’s government, administrative capacity in Tigray remains constrained and contested. As a result, extraction increasingly operates through parallel systems involving military actors, brokers, and external buyers. The critical danger is timing: extraction is consolidating before institutions are strong enough to govern it.
The most dangerous misunderstanding is to treat liberation and resource wealth as guarantees of progress. Resources do not determine outcomes alone. They interact with institutions and political order at the moment of extraction.
Where institutions are strong and precede extraction, as in Botswana, mineral wealth strengthens the state. Where authority is fragmented or emerging, resources reorganize power itself.
Sudan shows war infrastructure. Sierra Leone shows fragmented extraction. Angola shows postwar consolidation. Eritrea shows centralized coercion. Congo shows long-term entanglement. Botswana shows institutional success. Tigray shows an unfolding struggle.
Minerals do not remain underground. They rise into politics.
The question is whether political orders emerging from war can build institutions strong enough to ensure that wealth becomes public capacity rather than a new form of domination.
History suggests this is rare. But not impossible.
