1.3
EXTRA-TERRITORIALISING VIOLENCE IN THE GOLD SUPPLY CHAIN:
A Critical Material-Discursive-Legal Perspective
September 2024
Rami Msallam
unpublished
Professor Dr. Susan Schuppli
Director, Centre for Research Architecture
Goldsmiths, University of London
In this dissertation, I contend that to pursue justice in the context of extractive industries, we must expand our understanding of violence beyond the immediate visible harm and incorporate the broader structural and historical forces that shape these industries. Expanding on what constitutes violence can help destabilise and deneutralise or even rupture what is often regarded as normal, of significant public interest or even economically essential.
In a narrow technical sense, the Swiss refinery Metalor was not held accountable for any complicity in the violence at the Bisha mine, as this can be justified by the absence of a legal principle criminalising its conduct. However, I argue that the issue extends beyond legal frameworks. The various layers of violence–material, structural, political, and discursive–create conditions that obscure the need for a legal foundation capable of recognising complicity in extractive violence.
Perceived legitimacy can shield industries from accountability, enabling impunity. For example, the Swiss Better Gold Initiative, designed to mitigate harms in small-scale mining, inadvertently legitimise large-scale industrial mining by portraying the latter as the modern, regulated, and less violent alternative. This obscures the disproportionate environmental and social devastation these operations cause on a much larger scale.
Similarly, the aesthetic dimension in activist visual language often reproduces a specific image of extractive violence—one that highlights the precarious physical and material conditions in artisanal and small-scale mining, while obscuring the forms of violence inherent in large-scale mining, thereby unintentionally reinforcing its legitimacy.
Furthermore, the disproportionate focus on the quantity and accessibility of customs data in the gold trade, while important, risks reducing the issue to purely techno-mechanical terms. This framework positions violence as an extraterritorial problem, manageable through reductive binary categories, such as those used in “Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas” (CAHRA), which dictate whether certain material flows are deemed legitimate.
The interwoven layers and forces that shape our world today must be understood through their spatial and temporal intersectionalities. This calls for a fundamental reimagining of positionality and the entanglement of material and physical violence with discursive and structural forms of violence. By rethinking our relationship to violence, we can move beyond legal victories and toward transformative justice that addresses the systemic roots of exploitation.