Part II - Immediacy

4 Coercive Expertise and the Paradox of Responsible Extraction in the Ruby Trade in Mozambique

Dry grass burns more easily.

Mozambican proverb (Hanlon 2020: 4)

Introduction

In February 2017, Mozambican state security forces in coordination with a mining company launched a major effort to expel informal ruby miners from a mining area in Montepuez, Northern Mozambique. On October 5, 2017, a group of mostly young men attacked the city of Mocímboa da Praia, about 300 kilometers away. They targeted police stations and killed police and civilians alike. They have come to be known as al Shabab and claim to fight in the name of a purified Islam. Some of the miners expelled in February made their way to Mocímboa da Praia, where they swelled the ranks of young men with no hope for formal employment or anything but a very bleak future (Habibe et al. 2019). This occurred in the context of a mining boom in rubies and natural gas in the country.

The prosperity of Mozambican elites and their foreign partners threw the poverty of these young men into stark relief. They became receptive to the ideas that the state was their enemy, that their Muslim brothers who collaborated with it were nonbelievers, and that they should establish a new social order based on what they believed to be a purified form of Islam (Habibe et al. 2019). They mounted an insurgency that their government and its military have been unable to contain.

The new insurgent movement expanded its territorial control across much of northern Cabo Delgado, killing thousands, displacing hundreds of thousands, and forcing thousands more to live in fear of their raids.¹ Efforts by Mozambican military forces as well as by foreign military and mercenary services have not succeeded in displacing them. The situation has stabilized since the occupation of Cabo Delgado by a multinational force composed mostly of Rwandan soldiers. By now, military personnel from more than twenty-four countries have fought in Mozambique (Hanlon 2022). There are still hundreds of violent confrontations between Mozambican security forces, foreign forces, insurgents, and citizens every month (Cabo Ligado 2024).

The seeds of this insurgency were apparently being sown as I was conducting interviews in the mining area as well as in the Mozambican capital of Maputo, some 2,000 kilometers to the south. This was my first trip to Mozambique, as I was looking into the intertwined dynamics of the legal and the illegal trade in rubies. The conditions in the mining area that I will describe in the pages that follow, and the economic and political processes that brought those conditions into existence, likely contributed to the current turmoil in Northern Mozambique (GI-TOC 2021). An overlooked dimension of this insurgency, and the political processes that brought it into existence, stems from the effects of an ethical project mounted by the ruby-mining company operating in the region. Efforts to implement transparency and responsible mining seem to have created the conditions of possibility for violence and dispossession.

This chapter provides an ethnographic examination of how rubies extracted by a multinational mining company in Northern Mozambique are constructed as ethical, responsible, and transparent. At the same time, rubies extracted by small-scale miners working with screens and shovels around the company concession become unethical, illicit, and opaque. My contention is that transparency is a technical claim, willfully mistaken as an ethical claim, and that it is weaponized against very poor people trying to extract a living from the ground beneath their feet. As I will suggest, ethical mining – a cornerstone of the mining company’s efforts to market its products – became the handmaiden to this international conflict. As such, it may be instructive to reflect on how (mostly) good-faith efforts to conduct ethical mining and ensure the responsible sourcing of precious minerals can push people to such desperate straits that they take up arms to kill. Dry grass burns more easily.

This chapter is based on research conducted in Europe during the summer of 2018 and in Mozambique in the summer of 2016. I left Mozambique a little more than a year before what one researcher has called the “first shot of the new civil war” (Hanlon 2020: 8). In Switzerland, England, and Ireland, I interviewed people associated with the mining company as well as the human rights lawyers who were suing them. I spoke to consultants to the mining industry and consultants to the World Bank on mining issues. I interviewed officers of the certification company that was trying to add rubies to its purview and academics who study precious mineral extraction in Africa. I spoke with gemstone wholesalers, jewelry dealers, and gemologists in their labs, as well as with founders and officers of consulting firms who are trying to help their clients make claims about traceable supply chains for colored gemstones. In Mozambique, I interviewed government officials charged with regulating the mining industry. I toured the corporate mine and spoke to their operational staff. I made a few visits to informal mining and trading sites, where I spoke with local government officials, traditional chiefs, and miners at work. I spent the most time with expatriate traders from West Africa who were facilitating the work of Mozambican and Tanzanian diggers and bringing their stones to buyers from Asia.

The empirical part of the argument unfolds as follows. A multinational mining company working with Mozambican political and military elites built the world’s largest and most productive ruby mine in the Montepuez region of Cabo Delgado in Northern Mozambique. They had a good indication that the mine would be productive because it was already being worked by a large contingent of artisanal miners. A new mining code in the country effectively criminalized unlicensed mining. A newer set of regulations for implementing the mining code legalized artisanal mining but imposed a series of requirements that no artisanal miner in Northern Mozambique could ever hope to achieve. These regulations were based on research funded by the World Bank and conducted by consultants to the mining industry. They were designed to eradicate child labor, empower women, and mitigate the environmental impacts of small-scale mining.

Informal ruby mining sustained a vibrant illegal but not necessarily illicit international economy that competed with the company’s near monopoly on Mozambican ruby production. Miners were subject to violent expropriation by state and company security forces. The mining company has always perceived and presented itself as ethical and transparent. It has ample incentive to do so. In the wake of the “blood diamond” scandals of the 2000s and in the context of a worldwide profusion of sourcing certification schemes (Arnold 2014), major jewelry retailers have begun to demand that their suppliers certify their products as having been “responsibly sourced.” The company describes its merchandise in this fashion and in good faith.

Contrasting Visions of Ethics and Transparency

This volume asks how transparency works. In the case of ruby mining in Northern Mozambique, transparency is bundled with broader concerns of ethics and responsibility in mining and trading. Indeed, as Van Bockstael (2018: 53) points out, these terms are often used interchangeably. Ethical and responsible mining is supposed to benefit the people in the places where resources are extracted. It is supposed to abide by local laws and international standards, contribute tax revenue, and avoid things such as child labor, unsafe working conditions, and the sexual exploitation of women in mining areas. But companies have responsibilities to their investors as well. They must disclose relevant financial information. They must also make predictions about their future profitability and disclose potential reputational and even physical risks to those profits.

These forms of responsibility, ethics, and transparency, which I call a regime of “coercive expertise,” are produced far from the Montepuez region of Cabo Delgado where people actually dig for rubies. A certification authority in London audits materials provided by mining companies and deems them responsible in order to assuage the consciences of retail jewelers and their wealthy clients. A law firm in another part of London dispatches investigators to Mozambique to contest these claims. A consultant in Dublin writes the regulations by which the mining code of Mozambique should be implemented to the supposed benefit of small-scale miners. Competent persons in Wales evaluate the extent of the resource to be mined and the profits that it might yield. Consultants based in Britain collect information about communities around mines and furnish it to mining companies in order that the companies can benefit those people through their corporate social responsibility programs, but also in order that they can prevent locals from infringing on their concession. At the same time, they map illegal networks of ruby mining and trading that might compete with the corporate miners.

These experts from across northwestern Europe have profound impacts on the lives of people in Northern Mozambique. They seem to have even contributed to creating the conditions of possibility for an armed insurgency. Their expertise allowed the mining company to violently displace local artisanal miners, while continuing to claim that its operations are responsible, ethical, and transparent.

Although in the Introduction to this volume the editors remind us that “transparency has become ubiquitous,” it is not so ubiquitous in the colored gemstone industry. I immediately alienated a high-end gem trader in Geneva whom I was trying to interview by telling him that I had come to his country to study transparency. Like many other members of traditional gem-trading families, he believed that efforts to impose transparency on the gem industry were led by corporate miners and corporate retail jewelry companies to subvert the international relationships of kinship, faith, and trust that have structured the gem trade for centuries. We see in both Samarawickrema’s and Shuman’s contributions to this volume (Chapters 3 and 6) that secrecy, and opacity, and even ignorance and deception can be ethical action in the gem trade. A perfectly traceable, transparent supply chain would make it impossible for people to do business. Rubies touch too many hands, pass through too many borders (and even the occasional colon), to make their journey completely legible. That is what makes artisan-mined gemstones capable of sustaining so many communities around the world. The ethics of the gem trade are refractory to the audit-based ethics of transparency.

The Most Precious Substance on Earth

Gem-quality ruby may be the most precious substance on earth. The traditional heartland of ruby mining is the Mogok Valley of Burma (Scalisi and Cook 1983). Some retailers consider Burmese rubies to be tainted by the human rights violations of the Myanmar military junta and refuse to sell them (National Jeweler 2008). Even so, supplies are scant. When rubies were discovered in Mozambique in 2009, this seemed to promise a large and relatively untainted supply of the red stones for the global market.

From 2009 to 2012, there was a ruby rush. Perhaps 10,000 people migrated to a remote area near the town of Montepuez in the Cabo Delgado province of Northern Mozambique. A local political and military figure formed a company and secured the legal right to extract rubies on a vast concession. He went looking for an international partner to do the actual mining. A UK-based gemstone-mining corporation paid him $3 million for a majority stake in his company and began operations.

This was difficult because the company was trying to open a large, mechanized mining operation in an area where thousands of people were already working. That work is illegal because the miners did not have licenses and because mining rights to that area had been conceded to a company. But the concession is vast, comprising hundreds of hectares; it was not fenced or signed; and there were six villages of people who had previously been subsistence farmers located inside of it.

The process of establishing the mining operation entailed the use of violence. That violence did not end when formal mining operations had begun. Allegations have been documented in painful and painstaking detail by a human rights law firm that sued the mining company in the UK.² Videos have appeared on social media and subsequently in the French press.³ They seem to show company security personnel directing Mozambican military and vigilante groups in the torture and sexual humiliation of miners working on their concession. The allegations and the videos are consistent with what miners and traders told me about their treatment at the hands of multiple security forces when I was in Mozambique.

This process took place in the context of a larger mining boom in Mozambique. The World Bank funded a technical assistance program for the extractive sector. This brought about a series of regulatory reforms that allowed foreign companies to extract mineral resources. They came in droves. My notes from a conversation with a World Bank consultant involved in this initiative say that, for a while, you couldn’t get a room in a hotel. You couldn’t get a table at a restaurant. And everyone wanted licenses. It was during this time that the political and military leader in Cabo Delgado secured his concession.

The UK-based mining company with which he partnered has been at the forefront of marketing responsible minerals. It used to bill itself as “The World’s Most Ethical Mining Company” in its advertisements. Eventually, it realized that this grandiose claim could carry some liabilities. Now it has a somewhat less snappy tagline, but ethics and responsibility are still central to how the company presents itself to the public.

The chief executive officer of the company, when I talked to him, was eager to ensure that they not be portrayed as “light saber-wielding Darth Vaders.” Indeed they are not. The executives of the company almost certainly did not direct their security forces to employ vigilantes to sexually humiliate informal miners. The company seems to have taken steps (including human rights training) to prevent its security personnel from doing such things again. The alleged abuses, disturbing as they are, pale in comparison to some of the enormities committed by mining companies and their allies elsewhere. It implements corporate social responsibility programs with more vigor than many other companies in the sector.

One of the ways in which it demonstrates its responsibility is by hiring consultants to speak with people in the surrounding community about how the mine can help them. There is one consultancy in particular that has staked itself out as the specialists in artisanal and small-scale mining. They work for the World Bank and national development agencies to help legitimize artisanal mining. But they also hire their services out to corporate clients.

For corporate clients, they use the techniques of social science research to conduct what they term “social terrain mapping.” (A phrase with disturbing echoes of the United States Army’s Human Terrain Systems program.) They look at the functioning of the economy built on illegal artisanal mining and try to find “leverage points” that the company can use to disrupt it.

You would be hard-pressed to find a group of people more knowledgeable and sympathetic toward artisanal miners. When they work for the World Bank or development agencies, they work with the miners’ best interests in mind. Even when they work for corporate clients, they try to help them see artisanal mining as a sociological problem rather than a law enforcement problem to be solved by the police or the army. This is good for the artisanal miners themselves.

But when you talk to their corporate clients, they describe the information they get from their consultants as “intel.” They highlight the fact that consultants can get better information because they are not seen as being associated with the company. The consultants tend to depict the artisanal miners as foreigners (and therefore not worthy of legal protection) or else as pawns in the hands of networks of traders that they describe as “international criminal organizations.”

The Ethics of Informality

The mining company holds rough ruby auctions several times per year in Singapore. These are silent auctions where a small number of companies are invited to present sealed bids for sorted and graded lots of rough ruby, which they then treat, cut, and polish, mostly in Thailand.

These auctions generate significant revenue, perhaps $50 million to $75 million each. Twenty-four percent of that revenue is paid back to the government of Mozambique as taxes and royalties. This is a significant source of cash for a government that is plagued by political instability and financial crisis. The company is scrupulous in its accounting and evidently proud to be one of the largest taxpayers in the region. This is one of the grounds for its claims to transparency.

In contrast, the people who mine rubies illegally in Mozambique do not have access to jewelry retailers. There is a long, informal supply chain connecting the two. In 2016, a corps of expatriate African traders – mostly West African Muslims, but also people from all over the continent – converged in Montepuez. They would “grubstake” Mozambican and Tanzanian diggers, providing them with food and tools to look for rubies for the traders to purchase. The expatriate African traders then sold the stones to a group of Thai gemstone buyers who had taken up residence in Montepuez. A smaller contingent of Sri Lankan traders also bought in the area. When I was in Mozambique in 2016, this commerce occurred quite openly. Since then, there has been a crackdown on the Asian community in Montepuez and an outbreak of hostilities across northern Cabo Delgado. The logic of the informal trade has changed, but West Africans still mediate between people who extract stones informally and the buyers who will cut and polish them abroad.

Asian buyers export the stones informally to Thailand and Sri Lanka. There, the rough gemstones are treated, cut, and polished. They pass from hand to hand among a number of traders as they find their way to Bangkok and Colombo. From there they journey to jewelry markets in the United States, China, India, and Europe. This is how the informal market seemed to work when I observed it in Mozambique in 2016 and in Thailand and Sri Lanka after that.

The informal ruby trade does not generate tax revenue. It is taxed informally as law enforcement personnel, customs authorities, local politicians, and others extract payments from miners and traders. It does, however, provide employment for large numbers of people, primarily young men, in an area where traditional subsistence agriculture may not be desirable or even viable and where there are few other economic opportunities.

The Cabo Delgado province has the highest level of inequality and the worst economic indicators of anywhere in Mozambique (Hanlon 2020). Most people are subsistence farmers, but rights to the subsoil supersede rights to farm on the surface. Hundreds of thousands of hectares of arable land have been conceded to mining companies.

Mining rubies on the company’s concession is illegal, but it offers a flash of hope to hungry and impoverished young men (and a few women as well). They might not leave a life of poverty and toil, but they might get a cell phone or a motorcycle or a few nights of revelry with money in their pockets. When I was in Montepuez, illegal mining and trading happened openly. There were occasional spasms of state violence but for the most part it was clear that the authorities were receiving their share of revenue from this illegal, but not illicit, activity.

Janet Roitman is at pains to point out the limitations of the idea of an “informal economy.” Illegal activities are quite formalized. State functionaries and elites are important participants. The illegal is embedded in everyday sociability, in governance, and in economic life (cf. Blundo et al. 2008: 8, 87). Illegal activities, like those of Mozambique’s ruby miners, are thus licit and ethical (Roitman 2005: 182). Roitman shows how regulatory regimes can summon new categories of people into existence in order to subject them to taxation and regulation. This seems to have occurred in Mozambique as well. A group of young men with shovels and screens digging for gem-bearing gravel are transformed by legislative fiat into trespassers and criminals. Visitors from neighboring African countries with enough capital to buy them food while they dig become part of an international organized criminal network. When a state relinquishes its revenue to foreign capital through privatization, it renders itself unable to provide basic services for its citizens. This pushes economic activity to the untaxable frontier. This in turn means that civil servants, including the police, military, and customs officials, cannot be paid by the state. So they tax the illegal activity through bribery. Thus, the illegal economies become the main source for the creation of wealth. But these activities could never be certified as ethical or transparent.

Who Shall Certify the Certifier?

When I conducted this research in 2017, rubies and other colored gemstones had never been included within the purview of any certification organization. Their supply chains were deemed to be too complex, fragmented, and opaque. Early attempts to impose due diligence requirements on the colored gemstone sector were met with fierce opposition from the trade (Schorr 2015). This project unfolded in the midst of a concerted push by a jewelry certification organization to expand its standards to include colored gemstones. This push seems to have been led by the same UK-based mining company that extracts rubies from Mozambique. Its success has been mixed.

If the jewelry certification authority gains a firmer foothold in the fractious colored gemstone business, this would be to the advantage of the UK mining company. If membership in the certification organization became a prerequisite for access to jewelry markets, then suppliers who used the informal markets would be excluded (or would have to invent and document new origin stories for their material). Larger companies that work in the formal economy would have less competition.

This process, which is designed to bring responsibility and transparency to gemstone supply chains, may well end up benefiting a company that is alleged to have been responsible for egregious acts of violence against informal miners. It enhances the value of the rubies sold by the company and devalues the rubies sold by its competitors in global informal markets.

Where the Elephants Are

The techniques of transparent and responsible mining create a regime of coercive expertise. There is a tendency in the literature produced by international consultants and development agencies to depict people who mine gems illegally as the victims of unscrupulous middlemen who buy their goods cheaply and sell them for astronomical prices. It is true that cut and polished rubies sell for much higher prices in Bangkok than uncut stones do in informal transactions at night in a tea shop in Montepuez. It is equally true that a group of informal miners who manage to unearth a tiny chip of purplish stone can sell it for more than they would earn in a year of selling peanuts in the streets of Mocímboa da Praia.

The notion that you can hoodwink gemstone miners because they do not know the value of their own stones has been convincingly debunked by the gemologist Richard Hughes (2014), but it continues to appear in the literature on responsible mining. It serves as a justification for the displacement of artisanal miners (for example) into the corporate social responsibility projects of multinational mining companies. Ignorance is selectively mobilized by those who have the most to gain from it. Michael Dove pointed to a similar trend in the studies of swidden agriculture in the tropics, where regulations that were purported to benefit shifting cultivators actually shifted the land they cultivated into the hands of large-scale plantations and timber extraction projects. He called this the “political economy of ignorance” (Dove 1983: 85).

This criminalization begs another question: Why is digging for rubies illegal? Why should a government prohibit the practice of taking a shovel and digging a hole in the ground, hoping it will intersect with a channel of ruby-rich gravel? In fact, this was not illegal until 2014, when a new mining code came into force in Mozambique. That law made it explicitly illegal to conduct any artisanal or small-scale mining without a “senha mineira” or mining pass. Those passes are not impossible to obtain. It takes a couple of years and a lot of paperwork. But it would be functionally impossible for itinerant miners, illiterate in Portuguese, to get one. And even if you do have a “mining pass” or, say, legal title to farmland, those titles can be superseded by concessions granted to large-scale mines operated by foreign companies.

When I set out to understand who wrote the 2014 mining code for Mozambique, I learned something that made me feel hopelessly naïve. I thought that countries’ legislatures wrote their own laws. This is not the case. The World Bank funds a technical assistance project for the natural resources sector with a focus on oil and gas development. Ruby mining fell under its ambit. This project put out a tender for a company to write a new mining code for the country. That tender was bid on by a law firm that looked at what it deemed to be the best practices in mining law around the continent and elsewhere. It wrote a mining code that was subsequently adopted by the Mozambican legislature. This code created the mining pass system and thereby criminalized unlicensed mining.

I felt even more hopelessly naïve when I realized that similar processes had unfolded across Africa in the first decades of the twenty-first century. A World Bank push to formalize artisanal and small-scale mining led to the criminalization, illegalization, and informalization of miners across the continent and beyond (cf. Hilson 2017; Tschakert 2009; Verbrugge 2015). Indeed, Africa seems to be entering into a “fourth generation” of mining codes. Rather than solely liberalizing and deregulating the mining sector to attract foreign direct investment, new codes focus on transparency and ecological protection (Besada and Martin 2015). These goals seem laudable, but they enmesh small producers in a web of illegality. Perhaps this is part of their intention (Verbrugge 2015).

The World Bank project issued a second tender for a separate international consultancy to write the regulations to implement the new law as it relates to artisanal and small-scale mining. I met with the consultant who led the team that wrote those regulations. She has worked alongside artisanal miners over the course of a twenty-five-year career as a consultant in Africa. But even she acknowledged that the regulations she had developed could not work for artisanal miners. There was half a page of regulations about what kind of clothing you are supposed to wear. This is called PPE or personal protective equipment. These guys, she said, can barely afford their flip-flops. So they are stuck in a situation of illegality.

Laws crafted in conference rooms in the capital city of Maputo, or thousands of miles away in Europe, are implemented in frontier areas like Nampula or Cabo Delgado where they enter into a field of multiple overlapping and conflicting legal regimes.⁴ Codes regulating people’s ability to dig into the ground under their feet attempt to replace simple systems with complex ones. They attempt to replace fluid structures with stable ones. But they can never quite work when rubies are a scant six meters from the surface. In this context, informal mining can be an important form of wealth creation and a dangerous activity to be violently extirpated at the same time.

Another group of consultants works on behalf of investors. The company in question was seeking to be listed on the London Stock Exchange. In order for a mining company to be listed, it needs to provide a “competent persons report.” This means that a company that is qualified as a “competent person” has assessed its operation and determined that there is a mineral resource where it intends to mine and that it is possible from a geological and regulatory perspective to mine it profitably. There have been many stock market scams in the mining business (see Tsing 2005: 56–71). The competent persons report is a mechanism to prevent them.

The competent persons report for the Montepuez ruby mine highlighted the presence of artisanal miners in two different sections. One was the section devoted to social and environmental risks. It pointed to the presence of artisanal miners as one of the biggest risks the company would face in its attempt to profit from the rubies on its concession. This has proven true.

The other section of the report that highlighted the presence of artisanal miners dealt with the size and richness of the mineral deposit that they were trying to exploit and the ease of access to it. The presence of people working illegally on the company’s concession was used as evidence that the deposit was large and easy to exploit.

There are no good geological indicators for gemstone deposits like this one. The stones occur here and there in beds of gravel under a few meters of alluvial soil. In a situation like this, the presence of people on a mining concession extracting the stones illegally is incontrovertible evidence of the presence of the stones themselves. As one consultant said to me, “You hunt elephants where the elephants are.” So miners working illegally are both the best indicator that you have an economically viable deposit and the biggest risk to your ability to exploit it.

The use of local miners as geological indicators for foreign industrial mining companies is nothing new. D’Avignon (2018) showed how French army officers did the same thing in Afrique-Occidentale Française (French West Africa) at the beginning of the twentieth century. Colonial authorities would grant licenses to private companies that effectively excluded Africans from the mines that they had discovered and worked (D’Avignon 2018: 182). Sabine Luning (2014) describes a similar process in the goldfields of Burkina Faso. “Junior” mining companies look to attract funding from “major” mining companies by demonstrating the scale of the resource they hope to extract. The strongest indicator of scale is the number of “illegals” working it (Luning 2014: 67). Through these processes, folk knowledge is transformed into corporate profit and the folks who generated it are recategorized as criminals. People have been hunting elephants where the elephants are for a long time.

The author of the social sections of these competent persons reports explained their methodology to me in an interview. I highlighted the fact that the report was written in 2015 when the company and state security forces were alleged to have been perpetrating some egregious acts of violence against these miners.

The person I spoke to holds a PhD in a social science discipline. But the report in question had been written by “the biodiversity person.” According to this logic, the adverse impacts on the people were equivalent to the impacts on the plants and animals in the mining area. I asked about where they get their data. It turns out that they get it from stakeholder engagement reports. These reports are written by the corporate social responsibility or community engagement staff, employed by the mine itself.

“Do you talk to anybody working around the mine?” She explained what the process of a site visit was like. You may have up to two days. One day is spent touring the mine and having it explained to you by the engineers. On the second day the mining community engagement people might drive you out to a village, in a mine vehicle, to talk to the villagers. Does someone speak Macua?⁵ Portuguese? No. Who does the translation? Mining company staff. So your sociological information is collected by a biologist, who does not speak a local language, in the course of an hour-long visit to a community that has been selected and supervised by the mining company? I asked the questions as gently as I could.

She pointed out to me, just a bit tartly, “Mining companies don’t want to make the world a better place. They won’t do anything more than they have to do, but if they have to do it, they will.”

It is not the job of competent persons to make the world a better place either. They are doing due diligence for investors and banks or for the company itself. They ask if it is compliant with what it said it will do. This is based on the environmental and social management plan that they have entered into with the government. She told me that this is based on the EIA (environmental impact assessment), the ESIA (environmental and social impact assessment), or the ESHIA (environmental, social, and health impact assessment). Those assessments are the basis of the company’s agreement with the government. “Look,” she said. “I have a conscience. In terms of due diligence, it’s not about conscience, but obligation.” If a company can produce an ESHIA, then competent persons can certify their operations as ethical and profitable investments, regardless of what may be happening at the mine itself.

Conclusion

To sum up, a company that bills itself as the world’s leading supplier of responsibly sourced colored gemstones leads a process to force suppliers of colored gemstones to be certified as responsible at the same time as it is being accused of gross human rights violations at its most profitable mine. A consultancy that works on behalf of artisanal miners in development projects also provides intel to corporate clients looking to break up illegal artisanal mining operations around their concessions. The mining code of Mozambique, a document that explicitly underlines the importance of artisanal and small-scale mining to the development of the country, criminalizes artisanal mining and renders it impossible to do legally under the regulatory framework it imposes.

Digging for gems with a shovel and a sieve generally does not hurt anyone, except occasionally the people doing it. It may benefit the poor people who mine. But it is criminalized in the name of transparency, responsibility, and ethical mining. Artisanal mining connects miners to networks based on trust, debt, and kinship across the globe, linking them to gemstone hubs in India, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, and New York. These networks have functioned, more or less smoothly, for centuries. They do not, however, fit the newly emerging and ever-shifting criteria of transparency or traceability. The economic activities of some of the poorest people in the world are subject to violent repression in order to assuage the consciences of consumers who must be among the richest people in the world if they can afford to buy fine rubies.

Transparency is a technical claim that has been mistaken for an ethical claim.⁶ Transparency is a way of knowing.⁷ It is a way of producing documents that are legible to auditors. It is a technique for accounting. It is not about justice. Illegally mined rubies are enmeshed in intensely local and intensely global networks of debt and repayment, kinship and reciprocity, trust and mistrust across linguistic, religious, and national boundaries, from the moment they come out of the ground. They cannot be accounted for within the accounting regimes that constitute the technologies of transparency.

Transparency is an epistemology. It is not a metaphysic. People do honest and ethical business that is illegal and opaque, even when transparency is weaponized against them. This is similar to the relationship between relational accountability and audit-based accountability discussed by Walsh in this volume (Chapter 9). A set of mutually understood expectations govern the relations among diggers and their patrons, African buyers and Asian buyers, Asian buyers and their customers around the world. If these expectations are upheld then that international web of relationships can be maintained. It is mostly beneficial to all parties, even if it is not legible to the techniques of transparency.

Ballestero asks “if the more transparency one intends to create, the more obscure things become” (2012: 160). I’m not sure. But I think there is some ethnographic value in teasing out how these processes unfold, how the actions of multinational corporations, Bretton Woods institutions, and the consultancies they employ impinge on the lives of the kinds of people anthropologists traditionally study. As Rolph Trouillot wrote: “[P]ower itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots” (Trouillot 2015: xix).

5 The Social Life of Digital Transparency

In Sweetness and Power (1985), anthropologist Sidney Mintz attempted to solve a perennial challenge in the study of commodity circulation: the ability to trace meaningful connections between global and local actors across different scales of production and consumption. In between slave labor in the colonies and proletarian consumption, Mintz suggested, the tastes, ideas, and material processes associated with sugar were rooted in productive processes taking place elsewhere. Where meaning and power intersect, it would be possible to reconstruct the political, ideological, and aesthetic force of sweetness within an industrially driven version of capitalist modernity. Sugar was, after all, the missing link between the colonial plantation system and the industrial factory, generating new forms of mercantile wealth, industrial work and consumption habits, and bureaucratic practices.

Mintz’s work was soon accompanied by a vibrant literature on the “social life of things” (Appadurai 1986), detailing how certain objects and commodities become active constituents of social relations. The study of chains and networks connecting producers and consumers – either in lateral or vertical frameworks, respectively contextualizing interactions with the object or in sequential stages of its circulation – was met with growing business concerns over more ethical and less harmful production processes. One response led to the introduction of instruments such as certification schemes, “chains of custody” devices, and traceability mechanisms to make the trajectories of material objects more transparent by uncovering the physical imprint of commodity networks. And yet, the transformative value of tracing things in motion – and the more recent promise of unmediated transparency brought to the fore through digital means – remains to be assessed. What does the world look like from the perspective of a traceability initiative?

This chapter examines the challenges of implementing traceability to ensure that certain minerals and metals are deemed conflict-free. Based on research of responsible sourcing initiatives in the cobalt and diamond industries, and the hopes pinned to the project of digital transparency, we consider how local producers respond to, or end up being excluded from, the growing adoption of monitoring and transparency devices in mineral supply chains. Attempts to make production legible and visible to consumers through digital technologies, we suggest, require attention to the “political geography of materials … associated with the production of information” (Barry 2013: 5). We document the ideological and material underpinnings of transparency supported by the adoption of digital instruments for tracing the extraction and circulation of minerals and metals. If these technologies of digital transparency primarily target downstream actors in an “unidirectional” (Mantz 2018: 34) account of commodity chains, they fail to deliver on the promise of addressing the gap between producers and consumers or trouble the underlying inequities and exclusionary practices of extractive production, when not reinforcing them.

Based on research in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC’s) cobalt mines of Kolwezi and in mining sites partnered with De Beers’s GemFair program in Sierra Leone, the chapter examines each resource in turn to understand how digital transparency permeates the “ethicality” of diamonds, an icon of hyper-consumption, and “conflict-free” cobalt, a critical component in the electrification and decarbonization of the global economy. Second, the chapter considers the implications of this digital turn in traceability mechanisms formerly reliant on third-party verification. We take stock of digital alternatives to paper-based certification, monitoring, and traceability by looking at the intersection of power and meaning in the social life of digital transparency, to follow Mintz (1985). Depending on what is made visible, to whom, and through what acts and artifacts of disclosure and calculation, these instruments – in their presumed rationality, objectivity, and neutrality – create the conditions for masking power relations and heightening the gap between different actors in this supply chain. If digital transparency operates through practices of concealment and suppression, even as it is represented as the technological pinnacle of accountability, these digital-based techno-regimes are increasingly confronted with the complex realities of the everyday life and labor of artisanal miners, who make up a significant share of global production. Artisanal mining pits in the DRC or Sierra Leone, one could say, reveal the pitfalls of “techno-fix” solutions to the problem of transparent supply chains.

Data were gathered between 2016 and 2020 in a variety of settings, including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD’s) Responsible Mineral Supply Chains Forum, the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS), and, between 2019 and 2020, in mining sites in the DRC (Kolwezi) and Sierra Leone. To develop a comparative framework between digital traceability solutions operationalized under the banner of responsible and ethical sourcing in the cobalt and diamond supply chain, interviews and field visits took place with actors in mining companies, NGOs, certification bodies, and standards development organizations. Against the backdrop of fragmented and siloed approaches to transparency mechanisms in increasingly complex supply chains, this critical examination of the workings of digital traceability reveals the deep and shared inequalities underpinning the extractive regime and the limits of a regime of techno-based transparency operated from afar.

From Paper to Digital: The Promise of Unmediated Transparency

Most of the world’s rough diamond production – upwards of 80 percent, according to some estimates – arrives in Antwerp, Belgium, in 500 high-security shipments per day. The majority of these shipments end up in the Diamond Office at Hoveniersstraat 22, next to the old Sephardic synagogue, where on any given day hundreds of sealed bags containing paper certificates issued by a Kimberley Process-recognized entity are processed. Once screened individually and before being sent out for export again, a new certificate is reproduced by a single copying machine on the ground floor, which prints out 30,000 out of the 60,000 certificates issued by the KPCS every year. As we peeked at the copying machine across the room in the Diamond Office, the chair of the KPCS’s Working Group of Diamond Experts conveyed his exasperation to the group of visitors attending the KPCS meeting in Antwerp in 2018: NGOs, he suggested, often mistake the KPCS’s work of documenting diamonds for a certificate of origin. “It is not; it’s a conflict-free certificate.”

The group visiting the Diamond Office on that occasion was eventually chaperoned to a local tender company two buildings down the road. This tender house is used by an elite and very exclusive group of buyers working for some of the largest diamond-mining companies in the world: Alrosa, De Beers, Dominion, and Rio Tinto. It is one of 1,600 diamond businesses registered in Antwerp where diamonds are mixed and sorted before being sold again for clients expecting specific qualities and quantities. After going through security, a diamond trader received the group, spreading open bag after bag of rough diamonds of different sizes, colors, and qualities, some emblazoned with the supplying company’s logo and weighing more than a kilo. As this expert trader described it, mines produce a typical “footprint” of stones. On the basis of a statistical probability, experts produce assessments on the source of diamonds before they are mixed with stones of other origins. In some cases, conflict-free compliance is ensured at a distance. As discussed in the KPCS meeting at the time, local producers in the Central African Republic had to submit rudimentary images to identify the footprint of the so-called “run of mine” over a given period of time, as it was impossible to ensure on-the-ground monitoring due to ongoing conflict. As seen in the images, the piled-up stones and overlaying date stamps precluded proper visual assessment from afar, even if the biggest technical hurdle was poor internet connectivity for uploading images, as the experts in the plenary session admitted.

This visit to the world’s diamond capital is instructive in various ways. First, the KPCS is arguably the most successful arbiter and insurance standard against conflict-laden diamonds. Despite the KPCS’s relative success in stemming the flow of conflict diamonds, it did not impede the flow of Russian diamond production in the aftermath of the war in Ukraine. Second, the elephant in the room continues to be artisanal mining, which lurks menacingly in the background of these initiatives. These miners are at once the target of ethical initiatives while being cast as a dangerous threat or a problem to be addressed. As one diplomat responsible for Switzerland’s Sanctions Unit confided, as if letting us in on a secret, artisanal mining is the “Achilles’ heel” of the KPCS. This inescapability is similar to the plight of artisanal miners in other sectors, including cobalt: as we were told by a local NGO staff member in Kolwezi, DRC – home to the richest high-ore cobalt grade surface veins in the world – “There is no future where there is no ASM [artisanal mining].” Lastly, the technical challenges of implementing the certificate – from the photocopying machine in Antwerp to limited internet connectivity – become artifacts legitimizing the commitment to overcome paper-based obsolescence or human error through new digital technologies. Echoing the broader proliferation of traceability programs for minerals and metals, according to the 2016 mid-term KPCS report, state and corporate stakeholders began exploring the adoption of blockchain technology in its certification process to “eradicate false KPCS certificates and reduce the impact of human error while uploading data.”

This techno-optimistic belief in the perfectibility of digital transparency exists in the wake of more than two decades of transparency work. In the early 1990s, transparency emerged as a new concept to address development failures that were linked to corruption. Through transparency, it was argued, the public would be able to hold government bodies and companies accountable for their actions, hindering corruption and the embezzlement of public funds (Gaventa and McGee 2013: 4; Garsten and Jacobsson 2011). With the establishment of Transparency International in 1994, transparency manifested itself as an important international norm (David-Barrett and Okamura 2016: 228–229). The concept has also become part of the construction of ethical commodities since it offers consumers and network participants the chance to “‘see’ along the commodity chain” as well as assurance that the commodity was produced under ethical conditions (Mutersbaugh and Lyon 2010: 30).

Since the mid 2010s, the mining industry began rolling out digital-based traceability technologies across mineral supply chains, adding to a wide array of regulatory instruments and responsible sourcing initiatives. A UN report defines traceability as “the ability to identify and trace the history, distribution, location and application of products, parts and materials, to ensure the reliability of sustainability claims, in the areas of human rights, labour (including health and safety), the environment and anti-corruption” (UNGC and BSR 2014: 6). Tarnished by human rights violations, child labor, and minerals used to fund conflicts, these new digital solutions were meant to reassure consumers and produce accountability by removing the need for intermediaries or trusted partners to verify, audit, or certify supply chain information. Traceability schemes have been developed using QR codes and other technological devices to trace where and by whom the purchased commodity was produced as a marker of ethicality (e.g., Carrier 2012: 14; UNGC and BSR 2014: 15–18). If traceability has become the new ethical norm in the natural resource sector (Calvão and Gronwald 2019: 3), the emergence of blockchains – an advanced version of distributed ledger technologies – effectively expands the scope and socioeconomic impact of existing traceability initiatives.

In what follows, we examine two competing approaches for digital transparency developed in the diamond and cobalt sector. Though differently designed to ethically engage with the artisanal mining sector – in the case of GemFair – and develop responsible sourcing practices despite artisanal mining – in the case of cobalt – they both share a concern with the transition from material to digital technologies of traceability and provenance. In common, they ultimately confer legitimacy to the corporate actors implementing them, rather than fundamentally address the key issues in both supply chains. But each in turn reveals distinct features of the growing economy of digital transparency.

Making Diamonds Ethical

In 2018, De Beers declared its return to Sierra Leone with an ethical initiative for the artisanal diamond-mining sector called GemFair. For De Beers’s CEO Bruce Cleaver, the artisanal mining sector was crucial for many poverty-affected communities struggling for survival, but “informal” and “unregulated” practices had hindered miners from accessing “established international markets” and their “ability to derive fair value” (Mining Journal 2018). The De Beers initiative builds on the previous model of the Diamond Development Initiative (DDI), founded in 2005 by industry members, NGOs, and national governments to specifically address development challenges in the artisanal diamond-mining sector through a certification system for ethically sourced diamonds in Sierra Leone (Smillie 2014: 151).¹ A decade later, in 2016, DDI introduced the so-called “Maendeleo Diamond Standards” (MDS),² with a similar aim of shifting artisan-mined diamonds into the formal economy where they could be traced and taxed by the local government. In response, GemFair was established in 2018 with the twin goals of ensuring fair prices and introducing a “digital solution” for traceability. The project was initially implemented in sixteen mining sites that complied with DDI’s MDS standards; by the time of this research, it had expanded to ninety-four mines. Though similar to MDS standards, GemFair included provisions regarding environmental regulations, the absence of serious human rights abuses, basic workers’ rights, and conflict- and violence-free extraction, as well as traceability (GemFair 2019a).

According to text on its website in 2019, GemFair is designed to “connect artisanal and small-scale miners to the global market through digital technology and assurance of ethical working standards,” based on three core principles of traceability, empowerment, and fair value. De Beers’s initiative explicitly mobilizes transparency and traceability as part of its efforts to render the ethical qualities of its diamonds visible to consumers – and, by extension, the ethical qualities of the company itself. The irony of describing De Beers as transparent should not escape us: De Beers has historically been notorious about its secretive operations (Epstein 1982; Hart 2001), and the company is extremely cautious over this pilot program for fears of it being replicated elsewhere and for potentially disclosing a return to its historical role of buyer of artisan-mined diamonds on a broader scale. Unsurprisingly, a local NGO representative described GemFair staff as shrouded in an aura of “secrecy”.

One of the central tenets of GemFair’s ethical approach to artisanal mining is provision for fair wages and revenues. Almost all mines visited, including those that were part of GemFair, employed a mix of “permanent” and daily wage laborers, the latter commonly referred to as “kosovo.”³ The daily wage of permanent workers was usually between $0.50 - $1.00 based on the exchange rate during the research; in mines participating in a financial scheme led by GemFair, these miners could receive the minimum wage of 600,000 leones per month. In addition, provided certain conditions were met, miners were also entitled to a share of the sale price.⁴ More broadly, GemFair justifies its ethical initiative by granting privileged access to markets and more transparent rough diamond evaluations.⁵ Interviews and observations during fieldwork seem to support this claim, particularly a general satisfaction with prices paid by GemFair and clear evaluation procedures.

The initiative is not without its challenges. For one, GemFair aimed to tackle the tributor–supporter system prevalent in the country, and the latter’s dependence on the former. It did so by providing direct access to diamond markets and acting as both dealer and exporter for miners associated with the initiative. Commonly, in well-established tributor–supporter relationships (D’Angelo 2015; Zack-Williams 1995), supporters finance a mining operation through the provision of materials, wages, food, and, in some cases, medical treatment as well as accommodation for miners, who in turn receive a daily payment of around 7,000–10,000 leones and one or two cups of rice per day (Maconachie and Hilson 2011: 295). However, miners enrolled in the GemFair program in many cases still had to procure outside supporters and were themselves financed by established dealers or exporters (e.g., GemFair 2019b: 8). The maintenance of the tributor–supporter arrangement under the GemFair initiative raised questions about who would ultimately stand to benefit from the higher prices offered by GemFair and the initiative’s ability to channel diamond production to its sales office. Thus, to be able to control the extractive process and the sale of diamonds, GemFair soon realized that it needed to provide direct monetary support for miners, and it selected around twenty member sites to be part of the pilot project.

Access to this pilot finance program works as a loan agreement, and mining sites supported financially by GemFair need to channel their diamond production to GemFair. Prior to this program, GemFair did not directly fund mining license holders, leveraging instead their direct access to the market to recruit members and capture more rough diamonds.

As in tributor–supporter arrangements, GemFair has risk assurance built into the scheme, whereby half of the amount invested by GemFair needs to be paid back with interest or “risk assurance.”⁶ GemFair states that this risk premium is to mitigate potential setbacks in the event that some sites are not economically viable and to cover the capital invested. Until this loan is paid back in full, GemFair adopts the same percentage-sharing model prevalent in tributor–supporter arrangements (GemFair keeps 70 percent of the sale price while the miner gets the remaining 30 percent). It is only once miners finish paying back the entire loan, including the “risk assurance,” that they are allowed to keep the profits from the sale. While presumably paying higher prices for diamonds, GemFair risks becoming just another supporter in the eyes of miners enrolled in the GemFair program, whose practices are often labeled as exploitative and opportunistic. By the time of our research, GemFair had managed to capture a significant part of the rough diamond production in the country, successfully re-establishing De Beers in the Sierra Leonean diamond market twenty years after its involvement in the trade of “conflict diamonds.” This return to the country follows the effective assumption of control over sites previously under the purview of DDI’s standards program.

Working Transparently

In theory, the project operates as follows: “certified” miners are provided with a toolkit, which includes a tablet with the GemFair app, a ruler, tamper-proof bags with QR codes, and a scale to measure the weight of diamonds. Once a diamond is found, miners take two pictures with the tablet: one of themselves with the diamond and one of the diamond against the ruler. They then weigh the diamond on the scale, record information on weight, color, shape, and quality of the diamond in the GemFair app, then seal the stone in the bag with a unique QR code for each site. No internet access is needed for “logging” the stone in the GemFair app. Only diamonds logged in the app and sealed in the bags can be taken to and sold in GemFair’s office in Koidu (GemFair n.d.). Only once miners “have achieved certain milestones in their progress” are they provided with the toolkit. Others who have yet to reach these milestones and who work without the toolkit need to call the GemFair office for each diamond they find, regardless of size and quality. GemFair staff then come to the mining site and log the diamond for them (GemFair 2019c: 14). Before being exported, the diamonds need to be valued by the Precious Mineral Trading Unit (PMTU) of the National Minerals Agency. The PMTU removes the stones from the bag to better sort and value them. The work of transparently logging, geotagging, and photographing the stones through the app is rendered as emotional value through the individual portrait of the miner.

Publicly, GemFair argues that it is open to all mining sites as long as they are licensed and meet the OECD requirements. The GemFair Manual (2019b: 10) explains how members can apply and how their application is assessed. Despite this public transparency, GemFair relies on other data sources such as gravel samples to assess mining sites’ potential productivity before enrollment in the program.⁷ By calculating the potential productivity of sites, GemFair maximizes the chance of profit while minimizing the risk of an unproductive site being included in the program. This pre-selection process is rather opaque, and miners do not take part in it. While miners continue to rely on “guesswork,” GemFair bases its operations on geological data in order to minimize risk and ensure a good return of diamonds. Already marginalized miners who might not have close links to the chiefdom authorities and are allocated potentially less productive sites are likely not reached by GemFair. Being able to participate in and profit from this ethical mineral scheme is hence predetermined by access to potentially productive sites, rendering the power imbalance between buyers and producers more visible.

Since its inception, GemFair has “developed a digital solution to enable traceability and source artisanal diamonds responsibly” (GemFair n.d.), and the use of digital technologies is central to this initiative. Technically speaking, GemFair does not provide stone-by-stone traceability back to the mine but ensures that the stones leaving the country through its channels originate from mines enrolled in the program (GemFair 2019c: 18).⁸ Thus, “traceability” ends at the point when the stones enter De Beers’s marketing channels, where they are sold to the company’s sightholders.⁹ And yet only a handful of toolkits, including tablets, had been handed out to miners at the time of research, and not all of the sixteen sites included in the project from its inception in 2018 had access to tablets. One miner who had been working with GemFair for two years stated that GemFair staff come to the sites to log the diamonds and seal them in bags, given the high levels of illiteracy of miners. Although he was literate and had completed all the training offered by GemFair, he was unsure if he would ever receive the toolkit. This is true of most sites currently enrolled in the GemFair initiative and most miners have yet to complete all the required training.

Miners commonly hold more than one mining license and operate several mining sites at the same time. This is also the case with miners operating under GemFair. Thus, there is a possibility that stones from a mining site operating outside the program’s purview find their way into the GemFair supply chain, threatening one of the underlying principles of the ethical initiative. Different stories circulated in the field that some miners would take stones home instead of logging them on site, mixing them with stones from other mining sites. Once an audit highlighted this possibility, GemFair promised to increase its risk management system by conducting due diligence on “all key individuals involved on the site” and the “extent to which they may be involved in or have access to other mining sites” (GemFair 2019d: 3), although the risk remains of mixing diamonds from different sources if the bags are not sealed on the spot. For miners, once a diamond is logged in the app, they are effectively locked in with GemFair; GemFair thus extends a form of control through digital means.

It should be mentioned that GemFair staff were aware of some of these limitations and demonstrated a genuine intention to “do good.” Despite this awareness, “ethically mined” initiatives are part of a highly unequal system of extraction and may, inadvertently, contribute to it while seeking to redress its underlying unfairness. Ultimately, digital transparency has a social life of its own, adapted to local contexts, often in contradiction to the implementation envisioned by its designers, in ways similar to the localization of foreign norms described by Engwicht (2018) for the implementation of the KPCS in Sierra Leone. What is more, and despite plans announced in 2019 (GemFair 2019c: 18) and a recent media statement opening up to the entire industry De Beers’s “first fully distributed diamond blockchain platform that starts at the source and operates at scale,”¹⁰ the GemFair model has not been integrated into “Tracr,” a blockchain project developed by De Beers to ensure stone-by-stone traceability back to the mine. As we will see with the case of digital traceability and blockchain-based solutions for cobalt, this exclusion is not a problem of design but is built into the very logic driving these initiatives.

Conflict-Free Cobalt

In the frenzy to feed the electric-powered green transition and to power “clean” renewable energy infrastructures, the DRC has become the world’s largest supplier of cobalt, most of which comes from the provinces of Lualaba and Haut Katanga. If cobalt was once considered a by-product metal in the extraction of copper or nickel, it has now been elevated to a strategic mineral in its own right (Olivetti et al. 2017: 229) and a key component of lithium-ion battery cell chemistries.¹¹ Cobalt extraction is planned to increase exponentially over the next decades to satisfy growing demands for electronic products and electric batteries, putting immense pressure on cobalt supplies. Unlike other critical minerals and metals necessary for “clean” energy technologies, cobalt stands apart due to the conditions under which it is sourced – a significant share by artisanal miners, easily accessible without industrial or mechanized methods – and the attention it has received in policy, industry, advocacy, and investment circles in the aftermath of accounts of child labor exploitation and human rights abuses.

As has been amply documented, the implementation of the OECD guidelines (2016), the Dodd–Frank Act (2010), or the European Union’s more recent Conflict Minerals Regulation (2021) represented a watershed moment in the effort to ensure safer and conflict-free supply chains. These regulations and guidelines, coupled with the lobbying support of the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), opened up new avenues for formalizing artisanal mining by promoting new forms of corporate engagement with the sector at risk of “outsourcing” responsibility by shifting the burden of extraction onto miners themselves through unwaged labor regimes in mixed or hybrid extractive spaces (Calvão et al. 2021). The release of an Amnesty International report and a subsequent lawsuit against tech companies over instances of child labor in cobalt mines brought further attention to the cobalt industry’s supply chain, highlighting forced labor, human rights abuses, and inadequate working conditions. Downstream companies were pressured to investigate their suppliers in the hope of avoiding any further reputational risks; this led to the creation of “model mines” where artisanal miners were given the opportunity to mine within corporate concessions.

For the cobalt industry, the opportunity to develop new models of engagement with artisanal mining turned the DRC into the poster child for the promotion of conflict-free minerals schemes. Although cobalt is not classified as a conflict mineral according to most regulations and standards, it is taken up pre-emptively in broader initiatives aiming to improve human rights and avoid conflict, child labor, and labor exploitation. These efforts build upon a decade of concerted efforts across the extractive industry toward the formalization of artisanal mining and sustainable sourcing, including the standards developed by the umbrella organization of the Responsible Minerals Initiative (RMI), to differentiate legitimate and illegitimate, “risk-prone” and “safe,” “clean” and “contaminated” cobalt sources, and, inherently, the legitimacy of the companies mining it. This technocratic model for human rights due diligence, in Raphael Deberdt’s study of responsible cobalt sourcing (2023), is turned into a tool of corporate legitimacy, rather than one of accountability.

These attempts to make everything “transparently visible” (Smith 2021: 42) can have dire consequences, including effectively rendering invisible miners of the so-called 3Ts (tin, tungsten, and tantalum), which happen to fall outside the limited scope of monitoring and certification programs. In James Smith’s account, not having the coveted barcoded tag often entails new forms of violence, confiscation, and restrictions on movement. It mattered little that talk of “blood” minerals in the postwar context seemed anachronistic to those directly involved in mining, or that the miners’ own “ethics of invisibility” – escaping the predatory gaze and exclusionary rule of authorities – was not taken into consideration by the advocates of this transparency apparatus (Smith 2021: 42). For Le Billon and Spiegel (2022), certification and transparency “fixes” to promote conflict-free mineral supply chains come with “hidden costs,” including human rights abuses, devaluation of livelihoods and non-certified minerals, and other forms of petty criminality and corruption.

In Kolwezi, these initiatives also face quiet opposition from local elected representatives who perceive the burden of transparency as an added cost for state authorities, as it was relayed to us by an agent working for a responsible sourcing initiative. Paradoxically, given their position as a key protagonist of a traceability-based program for supply chain transparency, they suggested that cobalt “is not a conflict mineral, so there’s no need to do it.” Similarly, a minister in Lualaba Province complained to us that the costs of reporting and third-party auditing would entail a loss in competitiveness.¹² In the case of digital monitoring and certification, these costs are often displaced to the miners themselves as prices are established by mining companies and their trading offices; as seen in the case of GemFair, these digital technologies may also lock miners into a corporate-run sourcing system.

Digital Traceability: Cobalt on the Block

The commitment to digital transparency, alongside or as an alternative to third-party certification and audit practices, represents an important transformation in ethical standards. As cobalt is a critical component of electronic products and is sourced from a conflict-prone region, there has been an accelerated adoption of new technologies capable of reassuring consumers, investors, and regulators. As we have argued elsewhere (Calvão and Archer 2021), digital technologies of traceability are not neutral instruments for managing natural resource extraction; they have the capacity to actively impact livelihoods, mobility, and spatial practices through new forms of control and intermediation. Here, we examine two of the most prominent digital technologies for monitoring and end-to-end traceability in mineral supply chains: digital auditing and blockchain-based solutions.

Digital auditing techniques are part of a plethora of new responsible sourcing services aiming to comprehensively offer transparency solutions for different multinational companies. This coterie of new service providers has mushroomed in recent years along the supply chain to instill a semblance of “responsible” governance and by forcefully competing over who is better positioned to engage with artisanal cobalt miners. By “governing at a distance” in a regime of “technocratic morality,” Deberdt suggests (2023), these initiatives and their protagonists end up peripheralizing the agency of artisanal miners and selectively bracket their activities between moral and immoral narratives, with the miners made disposable by the conditions of their own erasure.

Despite the multiplication of digital solutions and blockchain-ready initiatives in the cobalt sector, these programs are limited in scope and implementation. One key initiative for responsible cobalt sourcing, meant to ensure due diligence for mining companies engaging with the artisanal sector in the Kolwezi region, operates under a subscription service contracted by mining companies and other “downstream” corporations requiring cobalt. It is meant to audit and monitor participating mining sites, and to offer “digital product traceability” services primarily for the benefit of an international audience. And yet, as we were told locally, the responsible sourcing initiative “doesn’t officially do traceability” as much as “documentary traceability.” In other words, field agents in each participating mine conducted a “mining site assessment” to verify and report data on incidents, potential violations, and general demographic data on the composition of the artisanal workforce. Despite the promised immediacy of digital solutions, human input is unavoidable – as was the case in Sierra Leone’s GemFair program. A field agent is required to upload information in an app, attribute a score on the basis of a predefined standard developed by the service provider, and have it eventually reviewed by an external regional officer. Once the reported information is checked for potential inconsistencies and inaccuracies, a country manager based outside the country gives it a final screening. Although this service provider does not effectively trace the extracted ore or avoid the risk of unmonitored cobalt entering the supply chain, the final report is made available on a platform where it can be freely utilized to legitimize its funding and supporting partners – including automakers, electronics manufacturers, mining companies, and development agencies. And yet, these attempts to digitally track and record cobalt transactions have failed to convincingly persuade the main targets of these interventions, not in spite of but because of their own conditions of possibility for design and implementation.¹³

Blockchain-based solutions, on the other hand, have gained prominence more recently as the definitive technological “fix” to certify that cobalt is “free” of conflict and child labor violations, and in every other way responsibly mined. For its proponents, this technology increases efficiency, prevents fraud, and ensures that ethical certification processes are more credible by practically removing all semblance of human mediation. In coming up with a technology-based solution for enforcing due diligence mechanisms, blockchains would address the limitations and inconsistencies of other digital-based solutions by embracing the principle of decentralized consensus-based protocols capable of avoiding record tampering, such as those defined by the RMI’s Blockchain Guidelines (2020). These guidelines flout common practice in industry-led blockchain initiatives operated through privately run and permissioned self-standing platforms where data is stored centrally. The technological rhetoric associated with blockchains creates an illusion of disintermediation and the purported absence of institutional mediation, as blockchains end up creating new intermediations (Çalışkan 2020).

Despite the hype and promise surrounding the adoption of blockchain solutions for traceability purposes, they rest upon a principle of “asset” management and not on the transformative potential of responsible and embedded extractive practices. As we were told rather candidly by a monitoring agent working for an organization exploring blockchain-enabled solutions in the cobalt sector, such solutions do not solve the problem: if “corruption at the base remains,” or until the information is “100 percent reliable,” the problem of upstream traceability will remain. In other words, without third-party assessment, or if blockchain solutions are not developed alongside “reasonable” due diligence, once the tracked stone moves up the supply chain, its origins are disentangled from the extractive site and no longer recorded. As is the case with other digital transparency solutions, these initiatives work on the basis of formalized settings and exclude those who fall outside them, thus perpetuating existing logics of value extraction.

Most pilot projects are in testing and exploration stages, with few examples of actual implementation. One of the first companies to offer a distributed ledger for ensuring ethically sourced cobalt, Canada-based Cobalt Blockchain Inc., had been developing two joint supply agreements in the Kolwezi and Lubumbashi region since 2018. Despite these agreements and pending license approvals, the company announced a name change in 2021 along with a broader range of action to include other digital minerals, including tin, tantalum, and tungsten. It seems that “blockchain” worked in this instance to lure in investors in successive fundraising rounds, harnessing the clout of sustainable development and ethical sourcing for consumer-centered performances of social responsibility.

The Responsible Sourcing Blockchain Network (RSBN) is perhaps the most anticipated blockchain solution currently being developed on IBM’s blockchain platform in collaboration with audit and responsible sourcing service provider RCS Global. Promising to deliver “sustainability through responsible sourcing,” IBM’s blockchain solution counts automakers, battery manufacturers, and cobalt suppliers among its founding members. “Companies that take sustainability and social justice seriously,” according to its mission statement online, “work to keep cobalt mined by hand out of their supply chains,” putting to rest any doubts regarding the inclusionary goals of artisanal mining. As in other similar blockchain projects, its distributed ledger is meant to “track production from mine to battery to end product,” draping in technical language the usual truisms of transparency, trust, and security. Here again, the benefit of responsible sourcing accrues primarily to corporate shareholders and the audit providers who verify the quality of the data and the implementation of regulatory frameworks, despite the promise of the “digitization of a paper process.”

ReSource is the other leading blockchain provider in the cobalt sector, offering a digital platform for the traceability of minerals and metals required for electric batteries on the basis of standards provided by the RMI and the ICMM. Designed “by the industry for the industry,” it has tentatively enrolled mining companies in partnership with the RMI and car companies. As a joint consortium with leading companies in the sector, it is still pending anti-trust approvals before its platform is implemented. Offering a technical solution for traceability and due diligence compliance that cannot easily be manipulated, this solution again benefits those who can monitor, report, and make use of provenance and sustainability data.

For all the “unprecedented” and “revolutionary” potential with which these solutions are presented, blockchain-based traceability initiatives still rest on a principle of unequal access that fosters new forms of exclusion and control, or is otherwise limited by the everyday reality of social life. The foundational principles of a digital ledger – openness, transparency, security – fall short of delivering on their promise, driven as they are by the economic and moralizing impetus to “clean” supply chains of potentially nefarious evidence. What is more, data collection is limited to areas with ongoing formalized artisanal mining, often under the auspices of large-scale industrial mines. As a corporate-sponsored digital program for traceability, it seeks to avoid the reputational risks of unregulated mining, de facto rendering the underlying objective of responsible sourcing increasingly moot and creating new exclusionary boundaries through the self-ascribed limits of its own program. Toward that end, mining companies, due diligence entities, and digital traceability providers enter a symbiotic business relationship based on competing subcontracting services in the name of transparency.

Conclusion

The promotion of more transparent and ethical initiatives to mitigate the environmental and reputational risks associated with mining has become an integral part of a broader turn toward responsible sourcing. It is not uncommon to come across industry publications and consumer ads featuring glossy images of artisanal producers and the social and environmental benefits of improved traceability. The recent adoption of digital transparency tools and advanced blockchain-based traceability promise a techno-optimistic and digitally enabled future rooted in the idea that more data is an end in and of itself toward more transparency. Ultimately, the immediacy of digital transparency – as a project of disintermediation – fails to grapple with the concrete challenges of its social life, where it takes shape, is contested, and is given new meaning.

As we have shown, these solutions are also fragmented and siloed, and potentially foster new forms of exclusion and dispossession. The digital project of making everything transparent can be applied selectively, leaving some things unreported or unsaid (e.g., Babidge 2015: 79–80), or can produce so much data that it creates what the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative board member Daniel Kaufmann calls “zombie transparency,” or data that is hard to understand, irrelevant, or hard to access. As AI scholar Kate Crawford put it, “complete transparency … is an impossible goal” (2021: 12) and more attention should be given to how these models engage “with its material architectures, contextual environments, and prevailing politics and by tracing how they are connected.” Until then, the project of digital transparency may end up replicating what Milton Mueller (2015: 1) calls the “fallacy of displaced control” of hyper-transparency, where revelations of “aberrant behavior” generate “pressures to regulate the intermediaries, instead of identifying and punishing the individuals responsible for the bad acts.”

In other words, the digital instruments designed to optimize supply chain management and address consumer anxieties about “contamination” may implicitly reproduce neocolonial narratives that seek to shed light on the darker corners of the world’s supply of raw materials. Some of these initiatives, as in the case of De Beers’s return to Sierra Leone, may inadvertently evoke the bygone era of corporate paternalism, where the instruments for producing transparency – and empowerment, by extension – are supplied only sparingly, if ever, to the miners themselves. Unlike De Beers’s dominant position in Sierra Leone, the scramble for control over cobalt sources in the DRC and the reputational risks of mining a key resource for “clean” energy in the region have led to a complex subcontracting economy. Competitively bidding for the most transparent and responsible services, mining companies, due diligence agents, and digital traceability providers enter a symbiotic and mutually beneficial relationship.

Be it with diamonds from Sierra Leone or cobalt from the DRC, as in many other sites across the world, the work of collecting data to ensure transparent and responsible sources is limited by design to areas with ongoing formalized artisanal mining or similar standards mechanisms, often under the auspices of large-scale industrial mines. Corporate-sponsored digital programs for traceability are meant to allow companies to pivot away from the reputational risks of unregulated mining. However, this renders moot the underlying objective of responsible sourcing programs, while potentially generating new exclusionary boundaries due to those programs’ self-ascribed limits. Making the world digitally transparent may grant legitimacy to the various extractive actors, but it does not fundamentally change the world around us or improve the circumstances in which others experience the world.

6 “I Never Looked into a Diamond” The Transparent Ignorance of the Diamond Broker

“You’re an archaeologist,” observed Shloimy, a Hasidic diamond broker with a graying beard and a Borsalino hat, as his eyes pierced me through his tortoiseshell-framed glasses.

“No,” I instinctively corrected him, coiling the black, lavaliere microphone back into its case, after first turning my Zoom H5 hand recorder off. It was a common mistake, even in the United States. Archaeology just happened to be a different subfield.

“I’m an ANTHROPOLOGIST.”

“No,” the expression on his face told me, “you are the one confused.” He knew the difference. “You’re studying an extinct species,” Shloimy declared, without a hint of irony. The diamond broker had already died out. I was just studying the aftermath. I had been led for the first time into the Beurs Voor Diamanthandel, one of the four trading halls of Antwerp’s diamond industry. What I had misread for an interview was a guided tour of the ruins. This was an excavation site. The necks of the daylight UV lamps, affixed to the end of each long wooden table, all bent into darkness. Save an aging trader seated a few tables over, the trading hall lay empty.

My entry into the trading hall happened so spontaneously, so unceremoniously. Our scheduled chat had started at Sam’s, the adjacent kosher restaurant. But the restaurant had closed now, too. And suddenly, our scheduled chat had to be relocated. Diamond brokers, unlike traders, are peripatetic. Without an office, Shloimy had nowhere to host me. I certainly had nowhere to host him. So he asked the guard at the desk in front of the trading hall if I could be granted entry under his supervision. The guard agreed. The inner sanctum, which I had long peered through with a sense of wonder and curiosity, was now before me. But as I learned, no one had traded here in earnest for many years. If the space had actually been operational, Shloimy explained to me, the guard would have refused me entry. Diamonds worth millions of dollars once circulated through these halls.¹ My very ability to access it testified to its disuse. Antwerp’s diamond trade had migrated from its home at Café Petit Duc on the neighboring Pelikaanstraat to this diamond bourse in 1904. Over 115 years later, whatever trade lingered took place in the offices on the floors above, in the virtual world of WhatsApp and Telegram groups, on secure online wholesale platforms like IDEX or RapNet, and on retail platforms such as Amazon and BlueNile. The trading halls had become a de facto club for old men in the industry – to sip coffee and tea, play an occasional game of backgammon, watch the news, or read the newspaper.²

We continued our chat. Shloimy nostalgically guided me through the space. There, he pointed to the side of the room, were the closed stalls where brokers would be given the goods from the vault. As Shloimy recreated the scene, conjuring images from the storehouse of his memory, I felt transported back to a different time, as one might imagine in a flashback scene when the dust and detritus of accumulated time lifts into a past more alive than the present. Shloimy reminisced how the brokers would then line up with their goods as the traders sat at the table. No chair was uninhabited. “Each day there was sitting next to the window, there was sitting a customer. And the brokers used to sit in the line to show goods. My grandfather was involved in the diamond industry, he was also a broker,” Shloimy told me. “But Antwerp is a small town. So everyone’s involved.” By “everyone,” Shloimy meant nearly all of the Jewish men:

Ninety percent of the people in that time, even more than 90 percent, 90 to 95 percent of the people went into diamonds. There wasn’t much choice of doing other things. So, it was an easy work to get into. We see only now how spoiled we were. Then in the times – I’m talking about my coming into the business. It was in 1983, ’84. We saw, now that we look back, we saw what a gan eden³ we were in that time.

I had heard about the good old days of the diamond industry before. It was a favorite pastime of the men I met. To trade in the diamond bourse trading hall once required a suit and tie. Now, most of the Hasidic men in the Jewish community had to learn skills elsewhere in the types of jobs that make your clothes dirty, as plumbers, electricians, and tilers, whereas Hasidic women often work as homemakers, bookkeepers, secretaries, and teachers.

But then something utterly unexpected occurred. Shloimy made a startling confession. “Because the broker is not necessary to understand. I’m already a broker, I was a broker for thirty years, I don’t understand yet a diamond. I never looked into a diamond. The opposite,” he continued, as if unfurling an oral argument in the dialectical logic of a Talmudic passage, where one first begins with an initial assumption (hava amina) only to later disprove it in the conclusion (maskana). “The bosses used to be angry at the brokers who looked at the diamonds because they said they didn’t want you to value their diamonds or something. You ask the price and you bring me a price. It’s none of your business if it’s ‘yes worth,’ if it’s ‘not worth.’ It’s worth 10 percent more, 5 percent less.”

Despite this brief, one-off encounter, his words stayed with me. They puzzled me. “I never looked into a diamond”? As I continued fieldwork to study the value of the human diamond broker at this protracted moment of his “vanishing,”⁴ this claim continued to reappear. Over 4,000 miles away, in a Starbucks nestled within the fortressed Bandra Kurla Complex in Mumbai, a Gujarati Indian broker made a similar claim over a cup of coffee. He explained, much to my bewilderment, that he refuses to even open diamond parcels before brokering them. It was better to stay ignorant of the goods he brokered.

What does one do with such a claim? Were these brokers lying? Was this an act of redirection or subterfuge?⁵ If this was a lie, however, it was a social lie – that is, something that circulated, that they told to others, and not just to themselves, that they collectively internalized and interiorized. A question stood before me: Taking ignorance as endowed with its own characteristics, “as much a social construct as knowing” (Gershon and Raj 2000), why might claiming ignorance be productive or strategic (Gershon 2000; McGoey 2012)?

I use this play of knowledge/ignorance between traders and brokers in the diamond transaction not only to understand the situated case of brokerage in the diamond industry, but also to challenge dominant frameworks for understanding the future of work and the cutting out of the middleman (or “disintermediation”) in supply chains (or “ignorance chains”⁶) and global industries across the globe. Standard accounts of disintermediation often flatly assume a narrative of technological determinism (and dystopianism), in which intermediaries are simply replaced by virtual technologies and platforms. As eloquently summarized by two anthropologists, “as money and payment forms are increasingly digitized, the future of financial transactions is imagined to be one in which intermediaries are no longer necessary, and where older material forms of value will decline in importance” (Tankha and Dalinghaus 2020: 345). Yet such promises of “direct and unmediated access” are illusory, for “no economic system can be fully disembedded from social relations and the concrete semiotic practices that mediate them” (Keane 2008: 37).

This chapter builds upon these trenchant critiques of mediation to rethink the precarious position of the broker in today’s diamond industry. It does so by examining the rise of a “transparency” regime, enabled by the standardization of diamond certificates, pricing lists, and e-commerce trading platforms. Upending an assumed nexus between power and knowledge (Foucault 1980; Matthews 2005), I argue that the broker’s power paradoxically lies within his professed ignorance of the goods he brokers and his studied indifference to his role within the transaction. This regime of transparency is, in effect, disrupting the strategic and necessary self-presentation of the broker as an ignorant and dispassionate actor, one divested of interests and sentiments. In so doing, it is not simply replacing or rendering the broker into obsolescence; rather, it is revealing the very ideological contradictions at the heart of brokerage itself.

Policing Ignorance

On the one hand, this delicate dialectic between knowledge and ignorance is not altogether specific to the position of the broker; one finds similar expressions in the policing of knowledge and the maintenance of ignorance on the manufacturing side of the diamond industry. Yekhezkel, an elderly Jewish owner of a former atelier in Antwerp, who now owns workshops in India, recounted how he would withhold the value of a rough diamond from his polishers. Here is how he reasoned it. If a polisher knew that a particular stone was valuable (i.e., worth $1 million or $0.5 million), he would become jittery and would be more likely to break it. Even when a polisher did break a stone, Yekhezkel would never disclose its value; he would simply tell the polisher to go home and rest for two days. If he disclosed the value of the stone, he reasoned, the polisher would never be able to return to work and polish with a steady hand.

In other instances, withholding information has functioned as an alibi for managerial control and the deskilling of workers (Braverman 1974). As early as 1970, a founder of French urban anthropology, Jacques Gutwirth, observed in an ethnography about Hasidic life and the diamond industry in Antwerp that:

homework has practically disappeared, with employers preferring to group their cleavers together, not in large factory rooms but in bright rooms or offices where they work at most three or four. On the other hand, the bosses try to institute a certain division of labor by “specializing” the cleavers in certain partial phases of operations, some practicing for example the initial fragmentations, and others the finishes. Belz Hasidic cleavers⁷ do not appreciate the process which, contrary to what the term “specialization” implies, actually restricts the experience and knowledge of the material and the trade, which remain essential if they want to then work on their own.

(Gutwirth 1970: 94)⁸

On the one hand, this claim of ignorance, at closer inspection, struck me as odd and unconvincing. On the other hand stood the most glaring problem: the unlikelihood of working in an industry and accruing no technical knowledge about the very commodities one brokered on a daily basis. By all accounts, diamond brokers should resemble tea brokers, whose value becomes defined precisely by their intimate relationship to or connoisseurship of a single commodity (Besky 2016). Instead, however, they represented themselves as if they worked within the financialized world of future traders in Chicago and London, where they could altogether forget which commodity they brokered (Zaloom 2006). The type of abstracted substitution that drives the world of financialized commodity future markets, however, could not be further from the world of diamond trading. While there have long been various attempts to financialize diamonds for investment schemes, the diamond commodity market has not undergone financialization; this is because, unlike nearly all other mined commodities (Ferry 2016), diamonds lack fungibility. Whereas gold’s properties afford it good fitness for purposes of investment, as each bar of gold can be traded for another, one diamond can never be interchangeable for another. Each natural diamond is unique and is graded by a myriad of qualities or parameters (color, carat, cut, and clarity). Unlike other commodities, where brokers can be indifferent to distinction, diamonds are all about distinction, and yet brokers claim indifference. They claim indifference to difference.

The Contradictions of the Broker

Several ethnographers and historians have noted the devaluation of brokers in the trade, often citing the broker’s lack of capital, of risk, or even of knowledge about diamonds as explanations for their inferiority in the industry (Laureys 2005: 32). Renee Rose Shield rehearses these familiar explanations in an ethnography of the diamond district on 47th Street in New York:

Brokers occupy a dubious status as they flit uncertainly between dealers who own the goods. They are essentially liminal, neither here nor there, but in between. Not only do they not own the goods, they often lack completely information about diamonds in general. Filling an essential role between two sides, these individuals are somewhat stigmatized. Like a marriage broker, they are useful in linking people together, but they are perhaps not completely necessary.

(Shield 2002: 99)

On one level, Shield voices a perennial tension in the study of brokerage: Are brokers foundational to creating markets or an impediment to their functioning (Vidal 2000)? Within the anti-Semitic discourse of European economic history, Jewish brokers have been treated as unproductive “parasites” on the Christian (body) politic (Raffles 2007). Both Shield and Laureys accept a dominant historiographic account that treats brokers as ignorant or superfluous. They misrecognize how ignorance may operate as a strategy that the broker uses to maintain his role as the impartial or disinterested “third” within the transaction (Simmel 1908). This stance must constantly be maintained in their affective role as seemingly impartial mediators in negotiating disputes between traders. In reality, they may operate as tertius gaudens (“a rejoicing third”), who pit trader against trader. Gutwirth astutely observes this in his ethnography:

In order for the deal to go through, the broker strives to exploit the subjective part of the judgment of the two parties between whom he mediates, and therefore to influence this judgment. If he is clever, he uses, both towards his “boss” and towards the client, ratiocinations, flattery, various arguments relating to applied social psychology. The methods vary, but cunning and invention always have a large place. Seller and buyer are not unaware of this; however, they feel the need to hear the argumentation despite all information which will allow them in particular to determine how far the concessions of the opposing party will go. The broker must have a lot of patience, endure objections and recriminations from both parties. His professional practice is usually accompanied by a submissive attitude, and even a certain obsequiousness.

(Gutwirth 1970: 87)

What nearly all of these scholars have curiously failed to theorize are the particular gendered qualities associated with the work of brokerage and how this relates to their devaluation in the industry. It is not altogether surprising that those actors who perform the most “feminized” affective work in a sector dominated by men, who are tasked with managing the egos of traders, who are meant to display “a lot of patience,” “a submissive attitude, and even a certain obsequiousness” (Gutwirth 1970: 87), are those who are devalued in the industry’s hierarchy.

The claim, moreover, contradicted the very interests of the broker: to accumulate the highest commission possible. In the diamond industry, the broker receives a commission. Commissions typically hover across the industry between 0.5 percent and 1 percent of the total transaction. To not seek the highest price, when presented with the opportunity, would be tantamount to self-sabotage. When I raised my suspicions about the broker’s “ignorance” across my field sites, however, brokers often offered logical responses about their own ignorance and why one would desire it. If it was revealed that you had cheated a trader or played one trader against another, it could tarnish your reputation. Unlike my interaction with Shloimy, their interactions were not one-off transactions; to sustain their livelihoods required ongoing maintenance of their reputations within the industry. And because diamond-trading networks are often built upon dynasties of intergenerational family firms, a broker would often work across multiple generations of a trading company.

Over croissants and coffee in his apartment overlooking one of Antwerp’s parks, Marcel, a middle-aged, secular Jewish ex-broker with a business degree, distilled the strategies for how to broker ignorantly. Marcel no longer worked as a broker. He would reveal, he claimed, what others would rather not share. He had no skin in the game.

There are two schools. One says the more you know, the better:

[The more credible you] look like in front of clients. Others say the least you know, the easiest it will be for you to sell. Because if you know too much about the stone, every detail of the stone, it’s hard sometimes to sell it. You don’t need to know everything. If you have a parcel and it says, or a stone and it says, it’s this and that, and so forth. And that’s the asking price and your boss says, “This is the minimum price you can sell it for,” then it’s easier to work than [if] you will analyze and know everything yourself about the stone. Or maybe say you’re going to lose faith in the stone if you don’t agree with what your boss said about it.

What Marcel articulated can be captured through a cliché: ignorance is bliss. Conversely, knowledge could become a source of liability. Curiously enough, Marcel did not refer to the most obvious form of “liability” that we might assume: the legal liability of defrauding a buyer (an explanation that was offered to me on at least one occasion – by an internationally recognized expert in the global diamond industry).⁹ This other type of liability would be the type of “willful blindness” associated with criminal law: “‘the deliberate avoidance of knowledge of the facts’ – that is, a person avoids gaining knowledge as a means of avoiding self-incrimination” (Bovensiepen and Pelkmans 2020: 388). But there are many varieties of “willful blindness,” and we need not think about this term in such strictly legalistic terms.¹⁰ Marcel focuses rather on the challenges that this knowledge presents to selling the stone and to the broker’s confidence, and on the undue friction in this delicate arrangement between broker, boss, and diamond. The assumption in Marcel’s account is that the broker could accurately assess the diamond’s value. In that sense, ignorance does not reference the broker’s (in)capacity to value the goods. To an extent, the question of the broker’s capacity is held in abeyance (or bracketed). It is, rather, the danger of misalignment, of veering too far from the instructions of the “boss” and creating undue friction within the transaction that propels this desire for ignorance. Ignorance should not be misconstrued as a measure of (in)capacity, but rather as a measure of desire, will, and strategy. Quite to the contrary, one must have the intellectual wherewithal to know when not to know – that is, when to strategically become or remain ignorant.

Dominant scholarly accounts focus on the broker’s structural position in bridging scales and translating between polities: the colonizer and the colonized (Geertz 1960), empire and its subjects (Rothman 2011), and formal and informal economies (Bailey 1963). While largely neglected by anthropologists after the decline of patron–client studies in the 1970s, and often reduced to an immoral or amoral social actor (Lindquist 2015), the figure of the broker is re-emerging in academic debates (Björkman 2021; Dua 2022; James 2011). In the most functional sense, the broker’s ignorance is paramount, to perpetuate the edifice or infrastructure of the transaction. As Georg Simmel observed in an essay on “The Triad”: “after all that has been said, it is clear that from an over-all viewpoint, the existence of the impartial third element serves the perpetuation of the group” (Simmel 1908: 152). In that sense, brokerage operates as a form of what I call agnotological ideology: the belief in the broker’s ignorance is instrumental to the smooth operation of the transaction.¹¹ The public secret (Taussig 1999) is that the broker presents himself as the impartial third, when he may very well be a tertius gaudens, who pits trader against trader (Simmel 1908). Their (claim to) ignorance is, in a manner of speaking, itself transparent to all parties in the transaction. Their transparent ignorance is not simply productive for the transaction; the transaction depends upon it.

The Rise of the Transparency Regime

Yet this has become more complicated in recent years, as industry actors must leave a “transparent” paper trail. Up until the late 1990s, Antwerp’s diamond industry infamously operated through zwart geld (unreported taxable income). Diamantaires did not generate invoices for their transactions and rarely left a paper trail. Across the industry, contracts are sealed orally by uttering mazal u’brakha (“luck and blessing”). Indeed, Belgian authorities sought to attract diamantaires from other trading hubs (particularly Amsterdam, to which many of Antwerp’s own diamantaires had migrated) throughout the first half of the twentieth century by deliberately overlooking illicit practices (Vanden Daelen 2018: 67). When the center of the diamond industry shifted to Amsterdam in the early twentieth century, for example, Belgium attracted its “Diamond Jews” to return through “incentives,” including “turning a blind eye towards monitoring the industry’s bookkeeping, workplace conditions, and adherence to employment laws” (67). After World War II, moreover, these incentives included “wage rises, return bonuses, practical and financial help in repatriation, and granting of citizenship” (67).

Beginning in the 1950s, the Belgian government enabled money laundering and the circulation of zwart geld by creating the “Don Pedro” system. At this historical moment, countries including Spain, Greece, and Italy (and several North African countries) banned the importing of diamonds. As explained by Eddy Vleeschdrager, a prominent leader in the diamond industry:

[A]s there were no export licenses, [these] buyers usually came to Antwerp carrying cash and returned unnoticed to their countries with the stones, avoiding any sort of billing. Antwerp diamond dealers found themselves in situations where large sales went unrecorded. The Belgian Government proposed that the industry create “artificial bills” for such sales, bills that would be referred to as “Don Pedro.”

(Goldstein 1999)

In the 1980s, however, the European Union began to introduce legislation combating money laundering and tax evasion. In 1986, Belgian authorities raided Roger Kirschen & Company for engaging in tax fraud on behalf of their clients in the diamond industry (Casert 1986). In 1991, Phillipe Maystadt, the Belgian finance minister, announced the end of the Don Pedro system. Although the diamond industry in Antwerp managed to find workarounds to this increased scrutiny for a time, Belgian lawmakers passed increasingly strict legislation in 1995 that required banks to disclose the true identities of parties involved in their clients’ transactions. The Belgian government, keen to capture a vast reserve of unreported income from the diamond industry, raided diamond offices, froze bank accounts, seized diamonds, and arrested those charged with tax evasion. It also investigated the banks that facilitated tax evasion, notably including Bank Max Fischer (Du Bois 1997). International anti-money laundering and legislation countering the financing of terrorism only intensified after 9/11, as the United States Congress passed the International Money Laundering Abatement and Anti-Terrorist Financing Act of 2001. The diamond industry became directly implicated, as smuggled diamonds became associated with the financing of global terrorist networks (e.g., Al-Qaeda). With the collapse of diamond banks, international banks that historically serviced the diamond industry (e.g., ABN AMRO) now offer far fewer lines of credit and bank loans to the midstream pipeline of the diamond industry. Between 2013 and 2019 alone, the diamond industry witnessed a $5 billion decrease in financing from banks (marking a 30 percent decline) (Bain & Company 2019).

In this epistemic regime, transparency becomes tethered to knowledge through the due diligence of “Know Your Customer” measures, which require that traders submit invoices (among other measures) to the Belgian government. This indirectly poses a threat to brokers. Through the Don Pedro system, brokers could historically shield both parties from knowledge of the other’s existence altogether. In that sense, the brokers not only benignly serve a search function, but may be enlisted to perform an anonymizing function within the industry, connecting parties who would otherwise refuse to conduct business. The broker could connect those who either do not know one another or wish not to know one another. Invoices now reveal each party’s identity, making transparent or, more precisely, de-anonymizing the identities of the parties involved. Traders can now more easily disintermediate brokers, transacting directly with the other party once they learn their identity – thereby cutting out the broker and the commission owed to him.

Moreover, the standardization of diamond certification now mediates nearly all transactions, alongside transparent price lists revealed to industry actors through downloadable Rapaport pricing reports and listings on e-commerce platforms such as RapNet. A “modernized” regime of diamond certificates and pricing lists has replaced the craft of valuation with a lab-certified document, thereby disrupting a sociality of salescraft (Cross and Heslop 2019) marked by contingency and contestation, improvisation and haggling. While diamond certification emerged in the 1970s, the technology was largely reserved for larger stones – that is, above a certain weight or carat. In a move toward greater standardization (in the name of transparency), traders increasingly certified even smaller stones. For the broker, this disrupted the necessary and desired asymmetry of information needed to conduct business. There needed to be a proper balance between those knowing and those “not-caring-to-know” (Last 1981) – whether it be the identity of a trader, which invoices now revealed, or the value of the diamond itself, which diamond certificates revealed by objectifying seemingly arbitrary characteristics of color and clarity into “scientifically” transparent, self-evident facts. Susan Falls distills the process in her ethnography of diamond branding and consumption:

GIA [diamond lab] creates meaningful discriminations through a highly contrived grading system that is then mapped onto a grading sheet called a “certificate.” Control over grading is assured by the use of specialized jargon, tools, and knowledge, all carefully leaked to the public in an effort to guide perceptions. What grading does, then, is maneuver the seemingly similar into a hierarchy of value.

(Falls 2014: 57)

Although accurate in her assessment, for purposes of analyzing the diamond “certificate” in relationship to the retail sector of the industry, Falls fails to realize how the diamond certificate has also radically reshaped the nature of trade and salescraft on the wholesale side of the supply chain. Parameters that could once be debated and haggled over between traders through a broker are now non-negotiable. They have been codified as law through the materiality of the standardized diamond certificate.

Disintermediation and Racialized Nostalgia

Yet it would be equally inaccurate to suggest that diamond traders and brokers explain the precarity of the diamond broker’s position as the consequence of a faceless abstraction (although many do frequently opine about the “transparency” of the industry). Baked into narratives about the crisis or “extinction” of the diamond broker (to borrow Shloimy’s language) are racialized accusations. The culprits of disintermediation are often (unsurprisingly) foreigners and strangers. Gujarati Indian traders entered the market and disrupted the delicate ecosystem of trust between Jewish “familiars.”

Before guiding me around the trading hall, Shloimy admitted to me that “there was always people who wanted to cut the brokerage out. The brokers were the easiest target to get rid of it.” He described the process by which this often occurs:

The main thing where it happens a lot – you bring up a customer, a big customer, into an office. And the first two times, the trade goes through you. Now – as you bring him up – you brought him up, he knows the address. He knows on his invoice the address. He would go behind your back, just plainly go to the office. Then you see him once. “Shalom Aleikhem, what are you doing here without me?”

While acknowledging that Jewish traders also engaged in this behavior, Shloimy attributed it as a unique attribute of “the Indians”:

It sometimes – the Indians, especially the Indians – they used to cut the brokers once they knew [who] the customer [was]. They cut the brokers. They went behind your back.

Indeed, Shloimy connected another major site of disintermediation, internet e-commerce, to the “nature” of Indian traders: “The internet is for sure, especially the Indians who have a tayve, a tendency, to go behind his back. This internet was for them … the Indians looked for every opportunity to cut out.” Shloimy locates this transformation within a particular historical development: the rise of internet e-commerce sales and the broader trend toward “transparency” within the diamond industry. In reality, however, even before the implementation of formal invoicing procedures and far before the emergence of internet e-commerce, as one trader recounted, traders had often tasked their female secretaries with surreptitiously trailing brokers around diamond traders’ offices to discover the other party’s identity.

Conclusion

There is a curious similarity between the way diamond brokers talk about their own relationship to the diamond industry and the way many of Antwerp’s Jews talk about their relationship to the Belgian government. Both often articulated their subject position as the “collateral damage” of a bureaucratic apparatus that intends to harm others, but always exceeds its target. Many of the Jews I met in Antwerp referred to themselves as the “collateral damage” of state policies targeted at their Muslim neighbors, like austerity measures targeted at harming “strangers” (allochtonen) by manipulating child allowances (kindergeld), anti-slaughtering legislation passed to ban halal meat, and investigations into the “secular” education taught at religious schools. Each of these measures inevitably threatened the religious Jewish community. And yet, often anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim themselves, they voted for the very politicians who passed these measures.

And while the analogy does not completely hold, brokers often positioned themselves as the collateral damage of transparency measures within the industry or the “unintended consequences, what might be called the side effects … or spill overs … produced by legal and bureaucratic processes” (Tuckett 2018). Indeed, many expressed a sense of the inevitability of their own erasure from the supply chain. Most brokers asked why I chose to study them, rather than a host of other workers being cut from supply chains across the globe. And yet, perhaps with an equal sense of obstinance, I have sought to outline a more complex and less totalizing account of “disintermediation” than the narrative often given to us about the future of work and technology.