African Doctoral and Masters researchers in Environmental Humanities, in the past 6 years, working in Mozambique, Malawi, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Botswana, Burundi, Ghana, Tanzania, Lesotho, Kenya, and DR Congo have consistently and independently come up against a similar story: that struggles in rural Africa are against neoliberal ideas of market-driven development, and neoliberal notions of environmentalism, that have proven fundamentally at odds with both economic and ecological wellbeing. Building on Contested Ecologies: Dialogues in the South on Nature and Knowledge (HSRC 2013; 275 citations to date), this volume develops an approach that identifies the ways in which environment and society is conceptualized by development “experts”, environmentalists and state officials, and contrasts those conceptualizations with understandings of ecology and wellbeing at ground level.

No comparable work on this topic has been done across ten African countries. Drawing on in-depth field research by African graduates, many of whom have pursued field research in their home languages, the collection makes a sustained and powerful case that local people’s struggles for livelihood have intensified against globalized corporate extractivism across the continent. Individual papers describe struggles over soil, mining, water, seed, pastoralism, energy, technology, forestry, and carbon trading.

Linking African struggles to Latin American rejection of extractivism and South Asian resistance to industrial agriculture and monocropping, the collection will be the first of its kind to make the case that indigenous and other political minorities’ forms of relation to land are vital resources for the protection of African ecological wellbeing, and that they define a contemporary African environmentalism that makes a crucial contribution to rethinking and re-storying climate negotiations, conservation, and development.

Offering insights on violence in conservation in Africa, this timely book demonstrates how and why the state pursues conservation objectives to the detriment of its citizens. It focuses on how the dehumanization of black people and indigenous groups, the insertion of global green agendas onto the continent, a lack of resource sovereignty, and neoliberal conservation account for why violence is a permanent feature of conservation in Africa. Chapters uncover various forms of violence experienced on the continent, revealing the local and global conditions that enable them, and propose pathways towards non-violent conservation. The book concludes that the ideology of conservation is also an ideology about people. Crucially, it highlights the implications of increasing investment in violent instruments and the institutionalization of militarized approaches for conservation, the state, and ordinary people. Scholars and students of political ecology and environmental policy and planning will greatly benefit from this book's drawing together of perspectives encompassing green violence and the militarization of conservation. It will also be an invigorating read for African studies researchers looking at coloniality and the re-evaluation of the African state, particularly through the lens of nature conservation.