ABSTRACT
The process of electrification aims to buttress the power of state institutions and expand the scope of state activity while countering the spread of ethnic or regional fragmentation. Attempts at rural electrification and expanding energy access through off-grid technologies represent additional ways electricity has been institutionalized within the wider project of development in Mozambique. Mozambique’s electricity infrastructures – and the energy resources on which they are based – underpin national sovereignty while being increasingly embroiled within regional and global trade circulations. Electricity has been central to high modernist discourses and ideologies across the global South, given its associations with scientific and technological progress, expanding production, the mastery of nature and the rational design of social order. Mozambique’s development is shaped by centuries of colonialism and extractive mercantilist capitalism, and its electricity infrastructure remains rooted in and geared towards export to neighbouring countries.
