Beschreibung
This lecture addresses familiar limits of the designation 'conflict gold': while it seems to clearly distinguish between 'good' and 'bad' gold, it fails to capture the ambiguity of situations in which the same gold sustains some people's livelihoods but causes destitution and death for others. The application of the term also gives rise to new ambiguities, as it merely calls for due diligence, an increased scrutiny of supply chains: as a process intended to provide trade networks with a pathway out of complicity in violent exploitation, due diligence avoids flagging a country's entire gold production as necessarily financing the continuation of violent conflict. One result of this attempt to save tradeability is to give space to the ambiguity of 'legal' gold that finances ruling elites' warfare and enters the global market through so-called good deliverers. I will illustrate these ambiguities through a closer examination of the role of gold in Sudan's war economies, thereby complicating the notions of complicity and illicit gold through concrete examples.
Dr Enrico Ille is Academic Staff Member at the Institute of African Studies at Leipzig University; he has studied Anthropology and Musicology at the universities of Leipzig and Halle, where he also received his Dr. phil. degree in Anthropology in 2013 for a thesis on social relations in post-war development projects. He was Urgent Anthropology Fellow for the British Museum and the Royal Anthropological Institute with a project on socio-ecological history of Kerma in northern Sudan, focusing on changing relations between date palms and humans. He worked as Consultant Researcher on gold mining in Sudan in the frame of Rift Valley Institute's X-Border project and as Postdoctoral Researcher in the project "The urban land nexus and inclusive urbanisation in Dar es Salaam, Mwanza and Khartoum" of the Institute of Development Studies (University of Sussex). He recently finished writing his habilitation on political ecology in/of Sudan and co-chairs the working group "Plants and politics" at the LeipzigLab.
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Veranstalter
Institut für Afrikawissenschaften
Kontakt
Sandra Benecchi
Universität Wien
Institut für Afrikawissenschaften
01427743223
sandra.benecchi(at)univie.ac.at
Erstellt am Donnerstag, 28. Mai 2026, 11:11
Letzte Änderung am Donnerstag, 28. Mai 2026, 11:25