Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book develops an original theoretical framework to explore contemporary politics of unliveability – particularly how precarity as a socially and materially mediated condition of life, as well as the impossibility of politics, is constituted by the violence of spatial capitalist abstractions. It presents the overarching theoretical framework on precarity that is based on the space, the violence, and the politics. The book then provides a historical interpretation of the changing modes of precarisation across colonial, postcolonial, and contemporary spatial orders of Mozambique. It also analyses how the space of the Cateme resettlement site is constituted through the dispossession generated by the spatiality of the mining enclave. The book traces how the precarity of life in Cateme is further sustained by the symbolic violence of spatial capitalist abstractions.