# Siddharth Kara The author whose 2023 book ***[[Cobalt Red]]*** made Congolese artisanal cobalt mining a mainstream Western concern — and drew sustained criticism from most of the researchers who work on the DRC. Kara's earlier work was on trafficking and forced labour: *Sex Trafficking* (2009), which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, *Bonded Labor* (2012) and *Modern Slavery* (2017). He has held positions at Harvard's Carr Center and Kennedy School, at UC Berkeley, and since 2020 at the University of Nottingham's Rights Lab. *Cobalt Red* was a Pulitzer finalist and a Financial Times Business Book of the Year shortlistee. Its observations — dangerous unshored tunnels, children present at sites, desperate pay, real and frequent deaths — are corroborated by Amnesty International and others and should not be dismissed. The criticisms are covered in detail on the book's own page. The short version is that they come from **Ben Radley** (Bath), **Sarah Katz-Lavigne** (Antwerp) and **Espérant Mwishamali Lukobo**, and **Emmanuel Umpula** of AFREWATCH with **Mark Dummett** of Amnesty — that is, from DRC specialists and from a Congolese human-rights organisation, not from industry. The structural observation worth carrying: **the *Cobalt Red* critique is the direct descendant of the [[Laura Seay]] and [[Séverine Autesserre]] critique of the Dodd-Frank campaign** — the same argument, fifteen years later, applied to cobalt instead of 3TG. That the argument recurs suggests the disagreement is not really about any one book but about whether Western advocacy on Congolese mining reliably helps the people it describes. ## See also [[Cobalt Red]] · [[Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining]] · [[Laura Seay]] · [[Séverine Autesserre]] · [[Conflict Minerals Hub]]