# Ben Radley Lecturer in international development at the University of Bath, with a long fieldwork base in South Kivu, and author of ***Disrupted Development in the Congo: The Fragile Foundations of the African Mining Consensus*** (Oxford University Press, 2023 open access / 2024 print). ## The argument Radley names and attacks the **"African Mining Consensus"** — the framework, backed by international financial institutions, donor governments and development agencies, holding that **transnational corporations should lead mining industrialisation in low-income African states** because they bring capital, technology and productivity. His evidence from Congolese industrial mining shows foreign corporations exhibiting **"mismanagement, inefficiencies, and rent-seeking"** and being "implicated in fuelling conflict and violence." That is, the pathologies routinely attributed to artisanal and informal mining are present in the industrial sector too — which undercuts the whole formalisation-as-remedy logic. The deeper claim is structural: the barriers to mining-led transformation — enclave economics, weak linkages, capital intensity that absorbs almost no labour, profit repatriation — **persist regardless of ownership**. Nationalising the same industrial model would not fix it. See [[Gécamines]] for the Congolese test of exactly that proposition. His alternative is a developmental-state argument rather than a rights argument: **mechanise labour-intensive domestic artisanal and small-scale mining**, raising productivity while absorbing labour and securing domestic retention of the value generated. ## On Cobalt Red His March 2023 review, "Who wants to hear about White Saviourism gone wrong?", is the most-cited critique of [[Siddharth Kara]]'s book. It invokes Binyavanga Wainaina's "How to Write About Africa" and argues Kara "ticks every box," quoting Kara's own description of a "grim wasteland of utter ruin... You will see no dignity or sustainability here." The substantive charges: the novelty claim is false, since Amnesty International and *Nature* had documented the same conditions years earlier; the historical lesson is ignored, since the 2000s conflict-minerals advocacy harmed mining communities by suppressing demand without improving conditions; and Western audiences reward sensationalised suffering over scholarship addressing systemic causes — which is why *[[Cobalt Red]]* was a bestseller and the critical literature was not. He and [[Christoph Vogel]] converge: both hold that Western interventions built on a mineral-greed theory of Congolese violence damaged the people they claimed to protect, and both **defend artisanal mining as a livelihood rather than treating it as a pathology.** ## See also [[Christoph Vogel]] · [[Siddharth Kara]] · [[Cobalt Red]] · [[Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining]] · [[Séverine Autesserre]]