A decade ago no one except geologists had heard of tantalum or 'coltan' - an obscure mineral that is an essential ingredient in mobile phones and laptops. Then, in 2000, reports began to leak out of Congo: of mines deep in the jungle where coltan was extracted in brutal conditions watched over by warlords. The United Nations sent a team to investigate, and its exposé of the relationship between violence and the exploitation of coltan and other natural resources contributed to a re-examination of scholarship on the motivations and strategies of armed groups. The politics of coltan encompass rebel militias, transnational corporations, determined activists, Hollywood celebrities, the rise of China, and the latest iGadget. Drawing on Congolese and activist voices, Nest analyses the two issues that define coltan politics: the relationship between coltan and violence in the Congo, and contestation between activists and corporations to reshape the global tantalum supply chain. The way production and trade of coltan is organised creates opportunities for armed groups, but the Congo wars are not solely, or even primarily, about coltan or minerals generally. Nest argues the political significance of coltan lies not in its causal link to violence, but in activists' skillful use of mobile phones as a symbol of how ordinary people and transnational corporations far from Africa are implicated in Congo's coltan industry and therefore its conflict. Nest examines the challenges coltan initiatives face in an activist 'marketplace' crowded with competing justice issues, and identifies lessons from coltan initiatives for the geopolitics of global resources more generally.

The board members of US company Dall & Houston receive a death threat from an alleged Islamic terrorist called Aarohum Al Rashid: unless they return the one billion dollars that they reaped from their direct involvement in the Iraq war, they will be killed off one by one. The plot addresses current global issues like the war for the control of coltan supplies, a mineral so valuable that it has become essential to new technology in the developed world. A great novel, charged with action, intrigue and first-class story telling.

This report evaluates the links between coltan trade and violence in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and examines the potential for recent legislation to break such links and reduce conflict.

Orientations -- Prologue: an introduction to the personal, methodological, and spatiotemporal scales of the project -- The eyes of the world: themes of movement, visualization, and (dis)embodiment in Congolese digital minerals extraction (an introduction) -- Mining worlds. War stories: seeing the world through war ; The magic chain: interdimensional movement in the supply chain for the "Black Minerals" ; Mining futures in the ruins -- The eyes of the world on Bisie and the game of tags ; Bisie during the time of movement ; Insects of the forest ; The battle of Bisie ; Closure ; Game of tags: auditing the digital minerals supply chain ; Conclusion: chains, holes, and wormholes.

-Originally published in Great Britain in 2015 by Oxford University Press.---Verso.

Describes the "conflict minerals" mined in the Congo amidst armed conflict and human rights abuses including gold, diamonds, coltan, tin, and tungsten used in cell phones, computers, and other electronics. Explores the slave labor, violence, and disease killing millions of Congolese mining these resources, and offers ways one can help.

'It's a clever book ... [Im Seong-sun] offers readers his razor-sharp observations on consumerism, capitalism and what it means to feel anonymous' M.W. Craven _______________ Sometimes work can be murder... The Consultant is very good at his job. He creates simple, elegant, effective solutions for... restructuring. Nothing obvious or messy. Certainly nothing anyone would ever suspect as murder. The 'natural deaths' he plans have always gone well: a medicine replaced here, a mechanism jammed there. His performance reviews are excellent. And it's not as though he knows these people. Until his next 'customer' turns out to be someone he not only knows but cares about, and for the first time, he begins to question the role he plays in the vast, anonymous Company. And as he slowly begins to understand the real scope of their work, he realises just how easy it would be for the Company to arrange one more perfect murder... But how far will he go to escape The Company? And how far will they go to stop him? The electrifying first novel from award-winning Korean thriller-writer Im Seong-Sun – now in English for the first time – combines the tension of the best crime fiction with searing social criticism to present a searing take-down of global corporate life.