Artisanal and small-scale mining through a “labour regime” lens: Consolidating a research agenda on labour exploitation
本文探讨如何用“劳动体制”概念重新理解手工和小规模采矿中的劳动剥削问题，强调社会再生产、差异生产与劳工抵抗三个研究方向，对关注非正规经济与资源开采的学者和政策制定者有参考价值。
This article examines the way the notion of labour regime in artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) research can contribute to new ways of conceptualising this sector's challenges. It starts by reviewing how the phenomenal expansion of ASM over the last decades has been problematised, and highlights the need to better understand what drives artisanal miners to operate under extremely precarious work conditions, and the role they play in shaping the conditions of the sector they evolve in. ASM labour has generally been approached in research from two main lines of debates, namely livelihoods and agrarian change, and as embedded in global commodity frontiers and networks. The former perspective played an important role in highlighting the diversity of forms of production, and the heterogeneity of labour comprising ASM. This body of work showed that these emerge from strategies adopted mainly by smallholders facing subsistence challenges who diversify their source of income by either branching out into mining or combining it with agricultural activities. The second line of enquiry approaches ASM as emerging from the complex interactions of actors and factors across scales in global commodity frontiers and competing territorialisation projects. Both perspectives highlight the importance of better conceptualising value extraction and ASM labour exploitation dynamics, and the article draws on recent work on “labour regimes” to suggest ways to move in this direction. At this juncture, we emphasise three areas of work that we suggest are worth pushing forth, namely the role of social reproduction dynamics underlying ASM work, the intersecting production of social difference and ASM labour control across supply chains, and the role of ASM resistance, collective mobilisation and agency. Through these, we hope to advance future research on exploitation dynamics in ASM labour regimes, in ways that may also have policy relevance, as labour has rarely been the latter's focus.