?The hole in the ground that cannot be moved?: Political risk as a racial vernacular of extractive industry development

This paper draws on two independently conducted ethnographies of mining finance centred on connections between London and South Africa (2012-14 & 2016-17), and research on the political risk industry in the UK and South Africa (2017-19). We show that the discourse of 'political risk' in the mining market constitutes a racial vernacular of extractive industry development which purports to concern itself with 'real' insurable risks, but in fact expresses racialized anxieties about the expression of sovereignty over resources in post-colonial states. We draw attention to the two, complementary extractive temporalities that arise from this racial vernacular of extractive industry development: a forward-looking process of folding anxieties about political risk into speculative valuations of mineral projects 'that cannot be moved', and a historicising temporality charac-terized by silencing the histories of anti-colonial attempts to remake the international economic order - a silencing upon which the authority of political risk discourse depends.