5 - Bujumbura

Summary

Chapter 5 examines the ongoing rush for Burundi’s rare earths twenty-five years after the Arusha agreement that put an end to the violent conflict that tore the country apart from 1993. It argues that Burundi’s transition into an origination site leans on the legacy of colonial, post-independence and post-1993 rule of law reforms which together have fostered what Mamdani (1996) calls ‘decentralized despotism’. The conflicting position of lawyers as either representatives of authoritarian power or champions of the rule of law is embedded in a structural bifurcation of the Burundian legal field that enables corporate predation, like that of beer giants. According to their political and social resources, lawyers are positioned alternately as gatekeepers of the rent of exported commodities, or vulnerable to another type of extraversion, aid dependency. This bifurcation makes Burundi a Petri dish of the hyper violence generated by the hyperlegality of late capitalism.