Introducing: Timothy Makori

Hi everyone, I am Timo. I join FASoS as an Assistant Professor in Globalisation and Development.

Prior to working at FASoS, I was an Inclusive Excellence Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Human Geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada. I obtained my PhD from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto in 2019.

My research aims to track social change in communities affected by natural resource extraction in Central Africa more broadly, but specifically in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In my forthcoming book, ‘Rich soils, empty hands: historical generations of mineworkers in the Congo Copperbelt’, I explore how labour serves as a useful analytic for studying the relationship between different temporal periods and the structural forces impinging upon the lives of various generations of miners living in the Congo Copperbelt region.

An interest in the internal dynamics of post-welfare decline in the Copperbelt drew my attention to the external regulation artisanal mining supply chains through sweeping international policies crafted in 2011 by the United States government and other multilateral agencies in response to concerns that artisanal mining was financing non-state armed groups in the Congo. The outcome of these moves created due diligence programmes that sought to improve the conditions of extraction and, more importantly, ‘clean’ the global supply of tin, tantalum and tungsten (3T) minerals—metals that are vital to our digital futures. The establishment of due diligence programmes has come at considerable economic cost to the Congolese. Yet, there are hardly any studies that have isolated their impacts even though security in the east remains sporadic and the living conditions in many mining communities have stagnated, if not out rightly declined. Through a mixed-methods study we attempt to isolate, measure and compare the impact of due diligence programmes in communities in eastern Congo where the programmes were implemented with those where they were not.

I am thrilled to part of FASoS and I genuinely look forward to learning about your interests, the needs of the vibrant student body, UM academia, the simple pleasures of the city of Maastricht and, if possible, a respectable amount of Dutch and, of course, ‘t Limburgs.

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