Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Netherlands
fellow
Nikkie Wiegink
Home institution
Utrecht University
Country of origin (home institution)
Netherlands
Discipline(s)
Anthropology and ethnology
Cultural studies
Theme(s)
Democracy, Citizenship, Governance
Environment, Sustainability & Biodiversity
Identity
Labor, Capital & Innovation
Fellowship dates
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Biography
Nikkie Wiegink is working at the Department of Cultural Anthropology as associate professor. Her most recent research project focuses on corporate sovereignty, resource extraction, and resettlement, for which she conducted research in Mozambique.
She is the author of the book Former Guerrillas in Mozambique (University of Pennsylvania Press), based on ethnographic fieldwork among former Renamo combatants. She has published on (former) armed group dynamics, Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration, war veterans, witchcraft, and citizenship.
Previously she worked as a consultant on disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration and small arms control in Sudan for the Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC) (2014-2015).
Research Project
Frontier Governance: Corporate Power, Displacement, and Coal Mines in Mozambique
Research question: What forms of governance emerge at the resource frontier and what (new) forms of citizenship and contestation does this produce?
How do transnational mining companies take over the role of the state? And what does it mean to become a “citizen of a corporation”? Corporations are among the most powerful intuitions of our time. Yet we know little of how corporations act as governing bodies. This is particularly relevant in the context of extractive projects like mining. In such instances corporations often have a degree of control over territory and people living there.
Nikkie Wiegink’s research Frontier Governance aims to study forms of governance and citizenship that emerge in the contexts of ‘extractive resource frontiers’, based on research conducted between 2016 and 2022 in the coal mining area of Tete province in Mozambique.
The book explores the discursive construction of the frontier as “empty space” and how regimes of governance change and make way for new ones. It is an ethnographic account of what frontier governance (re)produces and unsettles: institutional orders, political communities, relations to land and natural environments, and forms of citizenship and resistance.
Research Interests:
Anthropology; armed groups; corporate power; disarmament; demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) of combatants; energy transitions; infrastructure; Mozambique; resource extraction; sovereignty; sustainability; war and post war dynamics