Inter-scalar Responses to International Supply Chain Regulation

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Most digital products, such as cell phones, microprocessors and video game players, rely for their functioning on high charge-holding ores, which include columbite-tantalite (coltan), cassiterite, gold, and wolframite. The production and sale of these "digital minerals" has produced important economic opportunities for people in the developing world, which is where most of the ore is found. But digital minierals are also called "blood minerals" because illegal profits from their sale and trade have fueled the rise and perpetuation of some of the world's most deadly militarized conflicts. The international community has responded to this problem with new laws, such as Section 1502 of the United States' Dodd Frank Act, which require that corporations try to monitor mineral sourcing. The laws are supported by certification schemes that try to assure that the minerals purchased by international corporations are acquired through legal supply chains and are conflict free. However, little is known about the impact of these regulations on the actual workings of the mineral trade or how they connect with the complexities of the lives, politics, and economies of local people who, if negatively affected, may try to subvert and evade regulation. This project seeks to fill this gap with ethnographic field research in the most important center of digital mineral production, the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Over the course of a year, University of California at Davis anthropologist, Dr. James H. Smith, will conduct ethnographic research with artisanal miners, traders, state officials, and others in key Congo mining towns in order to understand the effectiveness and local impacts of these regulatory and certification processes. The researcher is in an excellent position to carry out this research. He is fluent in Swahili and has previously conducted significant research on the social formations that have developed around coltan and cassiterite mining in the towns where the certification system is now being implemented. The researcher will collect data with a mix of social science research methods including participant observation, focus groups, commodity chain analysis, and interviews. The research will contribute significantly to social science theories of how globalization processes simultaneously integrate and disconnect people and nations at multiple scales. Findings from this research also will be important for helping to improve the viability of mineral regulation programs.