Using a repertoire lens, this article examines business–community encounters around two large-scale greenfield projects operated by Chinese state-owned enterprises in Guinea's bauxite frontier. The heuristic highlights how tactics linked to different governance traditions re-emerge within micro-ecologies of meaning, objects, and practices. Drawing on five months of fieldwork in Guinea, I trace the dialogical interplay between: (a) evolving corporate repertoires aimed at transforming and maintaining access, ranging from technical framings to the routinisation of counterinsurgency tactics such as mass persuasion and the distribution of employment quotas; and (b) community repertoires of contention, which re-adapt the concepts of neo-tutorat and autochthony to renegotiate compensation and articulate rights-based claims. The article contributes to Africa–China scholarship with a micropolitical account of access relations, showing that large-scale projects hinge on both the political engineering of exceptions and the social engineering of access, often through the privatisation of state functions on resource frontiers.
Yifan Yang (Mon,) studied this question.