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Goudebou refugee camp in northern Burkina Faso has emerged as a testing ground for international efforts to find market-based solutions to the delivery of basic energy services in humanitarian contexts. This article follows energy researchers, humanitarian practitioners and entrepreneurs as they work to capture a market for energy here by mapping consumer demand, generating evidence that can prove the willingness of refugees to pay and securing contracts for the supply of solar powered technologies. Their efforts reveal the moral and material logics of humanitarian interventions in the field of energy, and point to the continued significance of 'crisis' for the making of Africa's energy politics, subjects and futures.

AbstractWhat are the ethical commitments of people who design, build, and sell solar photovoltaic technologies to those living in energy poverty across sub‐Saharan Africa and South Asia? Over the past decade, dramatic falls in the cost of solar photovoltaics have seen our increased capacity to convert sunlight into electricity married to projects of governance, social or moral reform, and expressions of care for distant others. Tracing these projects across the floor of an international trade fair in Dubai and a social enterprise in India, this essay shows that the pursuit of the solar good hinges on the knowable ground that is capitalism today.

The export processing or free trade zones that have been built since the 1960s across Central America and the Caribbean, north Africa and the Gulf states, and South and Southeast Asia have emerged as uniquely charged objects of anticipation—hope, conviction, and anxiety—about the capitalist future as much as sites of speculative investment in financial futures. This essay sets out to broaden our engagement of the diverse futures invested in these large-scale industrial infrastructure projects by examining the economy of anticipation upon which they are built.

Corporate gifts – from philanthropic donations to individual reward schemes – attract considerable attention from scholars for the kinds of moral, economic and political logics that motivate them. This article considers the gifts that transnational corporations give to producers and draws from Marilyn Strathern's writings on exchange and personhood in order to reverse dominant analyses. Focused on the gifting of gold coins to industrial workers at a global manufacturing unit in India, it brings together field-based observations with a diverse field of literature on the gift in anthropology. Against an analysis that sees the corporate gift harnessed directly to a corporate bottom line, this article proposes an alternative accounting that uses Strathern's notions of 'elicitation', 'revelation' and 'detachment' to explore the contours of knowledge, personhood and relationality in the transaction. If corporate gifts have powerful effects, the article argues, it is because they establish difference between the person of the giver and the person of the recipient and because they materialize actions, desires and capacities that accrue to and transform the recipients rather than simply because they are vessels for the interests of global capital. As social theory confronts the political economy of corporate giving, Strathern's writings prompt provocative questions about agency and power that challenge the hegemonic status of the modern corporation.

India's free trade zones are imagined by politicians, planners and business elites as 'engines of growth' and 'vehicles of social mobility'. Building upon a body of recent scholarship concerned with 'post-educational landscapes' in South Asia I challenge these visions by exploring how investments and achievements in education 'pay off' for a new generation of zone workers. Drawing on the biographies of young Telugu men with secondary-level technical qualifications, who are employed to cut and polish diamonds at the Vishakhapatnam Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in Andhra Pradesh, I show how the zone is a space in which young men are confronted with the devaluation of their education, their failure to realise local visions of masculine success, and the prospects of their future marginality. These experiences have important implications for the everyday politics of labour, shaping both consent and discontent in the terms and conditions of work.

ABSTRACTSince 2010, solar energy companies in North America and Europe have played a pivotal role in delivering clean, reliable and sustainable electricity to millions of people living off the grid across sub‐Saharan Africa. However, today, off‐grid solar energy in Africa is no longer seen as an unmitigated social and economic good. Inflows of private equity investment have led the employees and customers of off‐grid solar companies to question the industry's commercial dynamics. Their critiques address the mis‐selling of solar home systems and the technical limits of off‐grid infrastructures for domestic production, framed both by dominant market paradigms and by relationships to nation, community and family. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in East Africa's off‐grid solar industry, this study assembles these critical perspectives into a wider analysis of off‐grid solar power as an adverse 'infrastructure of inclusion'.