Rita Kesselring - Excess seen through the global lens: Zambian copper and Swiss commodity trading
Lecture abstract
Excess seen through the global lens: Zambian copper and Swiss commodity trading
An academic-journalist on X recently wrote: “A Swiss mining company in Zambia has been drilling for copper for over two decades. The proceeds went to the construction of an entire town in Switzerland. I’m done.“ While the tweet is factually vague (most likely deliberately pushing it), I could not have summarized the ultimate consequence of my work more succinctly. The production of copper in Zambia, which started with the region’s colonization in the late 19th century, has made available copper for the industrialization of Europe. But it has created more than that, especially since the re-privatization of Zambia’ mining sector under pressure of the World Bank and the IMF in the late 1980s and the rise of the Swiss commodity trading sector. My paper traces the mechanisms through which Switzerland today manages to make copper mining in Zambia and elsewhere work for its own prosperity by examining the – interdependent – negative externalities in Zambia and the positive externalities for Switzerland. How can we delineate business from exploitation, development from enclosures, value creation from excess?
About the lecturer
Rita Kesselring is an anthropologist and Associate Professor of Urban Studies at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. She is the author of Bodies of Truth (2017), Extraction, Global Commodity Trade, and Urban Development in Zambia’s Northwestern Province (2025) and co-editor of Mother Unknown (2025).