Coercive Expertise and the Paradox of Responsible Extraction in the Ruby Trade in Mozambique

This chapter provides an ethnographic examination of how rubies extracted by a multinational mining company in Northern Mozambique are constructed as ethical, responsible, and transparent. At the same time, rubies extracted by small-scale miners working with screens and shovels around the company concession become unethical, illicit, and opaque. Informal ruby mining sustained a vibrant and illegal, but not necessarily illicit, international economy. Miners were subject to violent expropriation by state and company security forces. Some joined an insurgency and attacked government institutions and extractive infrastructure. That conflict continues to this day. My contention is that transparency is a technical claim, willfully mistaken as an ethical claim. Transparency is weaponized against very poor people trying to extract a living from the ground beneath their feet. As a result, ethical mining became the handmaiden to an international conflict.