Professor Miles Larmer: List of publications

The first comparative historical analysis - local, national and transnational - of the cross-border Central African copperbelt; a key work in studies of labour, urbanisation and African studies.

The first comparative historical analysis - local, national and transnational - of the cross-border Central African copperbelt; a key work in studies of labour, urbanisation and African studies.

The first comparative historical analysis - local, national and transnational - of the cross-border Central African copperbelt; a key work in studies of labour, urbanisation and African studies.

The first comparative historical analysis - local, national and transnational - of the cross-border Central African copperbelt; a key work in studies of labour, urbanisation and African studies.

How and where were new African nations made at the moment of decolonization? Focusing on the periphery rather than the center provides an insightful answer to this question: imposing national identity in border regions with mixed and mobile populations, dynamic migrant flows, and cross-border linkages was a task fraught with contradiction. This article explores the establishment of Zambian political and diplomatic space in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the activities of Zambian political and diplomatic representatives in the southern Congolese city of Elisabethville in the early-to-mid 1960s. It does not assess how effective these officials were in imposing a sense of Zambian national identity, but rather what their efforts reveal about the ideas and values that informed state elites’ assertions of national identity and their relationship to history, local identities, and moral codes regarding, among other things, customary authority and gendered behavior. The article argues that nation-making in newly independent states involved the assertion of not only state sovereignty over territorial space but also symbolic power, the right to classify, and the moral and political notions that underlay ostensibly bureaucratic, disinterested state structures. Analysis of the attempts of Zambia's first diplomatic representatives to establish and assert their notion of Zambian-ness reveals the fragility of new national identities and the extent to which elites sought to underpin these identities by the assertion of moral certainties.

This introductory paper analyses historical and contemporary developments in the social and political mobilisation of what are termed ‘extractive communities’ in Africa. It demonstrates the centrality of diverse contestations, both between extractive corporations and extractive communities, and within communities themselves, over the real and envisioned benefits of mining and oil production. In contextualising the articles carried in this special section of Extractive Industries and Society, it places these dynamics in an assessment of Africa’s past and current position in global economic and political processes of extractive exploitation, and, building on the insights of these articles, suggests ways in which research on these communities may be developed in the future.

The Copperbelt region of Central Africa sits at the crossroads of political borders, trade corridors, migratory flows, and identity formations. The division of the region by a colonial/national border shaped not only its differential political economy, but also how this was perceived and represented. At the heart of all such representations was the relationship between minerals and their supposed capacity to effect economic, political, and social transformation. This article analyzes how this relationship has been understood and articulated from the precolonial period until today, and the ways that actual and potential mineral wealth have underwritten successive, often contested, political projects and aspirations. In identifying changes and enduring patterns in miningbased political representation, it suggests an alternative history of the Copperbelt region rooted in the political imaginaries surrounding mining and its potential for transformation.

Erik Kennes and Miles Larmer provide a history of the Katangese gendarmes and their largely undocumented role in many of the most important political and military conflicts in Central Africa. Katanga, located in today's Democratic Republic of Congo, seceded in 1960 as Congo achieved independence and the gendarmes fought as the unrecognized state's army during the Congo crisis. Kennes and Larmer explain how the ex-gendarmes, then exiled in Angola, struggled to maintain their national identity and return "home." They take readers through the complex history of the Katangese and their engagement in regional conflicts and Africa's Cold War. Kennes and Larmer show how the paths not taken at Africa's independence persist in contemporary political and military movements and bring new understandings to the challenges that personal and collective identities pose to the relationship between African nation-states and their citizens and subjects.

In September 2006, the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) and its presidential candidate, the late Levy Mwanawasa, were re-elected as the government of Zambia. The MMD’s fourth successive election victory since Zambia’s return to multiparty democracy in 1990-91 suggests that effective pluralism has yet to be entrenched in Zambian political life. Certainly, the optimism that surrounded that transition regarding the potential of democratisation to address the country’s profound social, economic and political problems proved unfounded. By the late 1990s, amidst economic collapse and a renewed authoritarianism that echoed aspects of the Zambian one-party state of the 1970s and 1980s, it appeared that formal democratisation had made little impact either on political culture or the lives of ordinary Zambians (Bratton & Posner 1999). In this sense, Zambia bore a strong resemblance to many other sub-Saharan African countries that experienced similar transitions in the early 1990s, only to see the ‘capture’ of new democratic structures by what Bartlett calls ‘older political logics’ (Bartlett 2000: 445). This chapter finds that, if the initial optimism surrounding the transition was overstated, then the subsequent pessimism was equally unwarranted. It will show how the pro-democracy movement that swept aside the apparently hegemonic one-party state was itself a complex alliance of popular and elite forces, in which supposedly popular civil society movements played a limited and problematic role. In an unconscious echo of Nkrumah’s directive to nationalist movements to ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom’, the MMD, first as popular movement and subsequently as political party, achieved a relatively smooth transition to power only by postponing the underlying questions that it faced regarding the nature of post-colonial governance and Zambia’s peripheral position in the global economy.

This volumes is the first in a planned series of publications which will place the writings of Valentine Musakanya in the public domain, in Zambia and internationally.