Gold, God, and Governance: The Sacred Politics of Gold Frontiers

Laura Kilbury, University of Massachusetts Boston

This study asks how order and regulation emerge in resource frontiers where formal institutions have collapsed. It argues that rather than the absence of governance, we find its transformation into sacralized resource rule—systems of extraction and environmental control legitimated through moral and religious authority. Gold’s portability, value, and symbolism make it a potent lens for examining this phenomenon. Drawing on comparative process tracing and network analysis across eight regions—the Sahel, Somalia, Sudan, eastern DRC, Afghanistan, Colombia, Peru, and the Philippines—the study traces how armed and political actors regulate mining, impose moral taxation, and justify ecological exploitation as divine duty or communal necessity. Three mechanisms—moral legitimacy, selective environmentalism, and transnational conversion—stabilize these arrangements and connect "sacralized" gold to global markets. By reconceptualizing governance as the management of belief and legitimacy rather than formal legality, the article advances understanding of how extraction produces order amid disorder.