“This Mine is for the Entire Casamance Coastline”: The Politics of Scale and the Future of the Extractive Frontier in Casamance, Senegal

Abstract

As evidenced by the widespread controversy surrounding an otherwise small-scale mining investment pending in Casamance, Senegal, uncertainty shapes the extension of the extractive frontier. Fent argues that amid this uncertainty, different actors are able to politicize or depoliticize extractive investments through the work of scaling. Opponents cast the project as part of larger-scale, longer-term extraction, linking it with regional narratives. By contrast, state and corporate actors depoliticized the mine by emphasizing its limited extent and downscaling conflict to the local level. This demonstrates the conflictual processes through which extractive frontiers are realized—and resisted—through both space and time.