ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how the structural violence of such spatial capitalist abstractions as extractivism engenders a specific modality of precarisation: it analyses how the space of the Cateme resettlement site is constituted through the dispossession generated by the spatiality of the mining enclosure in Tete. This enclave, rather than just being an exclusionary space, interacts with broader socio-economic landscapes of the province: it further accentuates the pre-existing class relations, thereby dispossessing vulnerable populations that do not have sufficient social and economic entitlements to successfully adapt to changing patterns of capital accumulation. These dynamics of dispossession also interlink with complex, bifurcated systems of land governance in Tete, where local actors, themselves victims and agents of dispossession, contribute to further marginalisation of the displaced people. Together with a number of shortcomings of the resettlement process – particularly the lack of fertile land or viable livelihood opportunities – these dynamics constitute Cateme as a space of suffering. Therefore, precarity in the resettlement site is engendered through multiple, overlaying spatialities of exclusion and dispossession generated by the structural violence of extractivism as a form of spatial capitalist abstraction.
