African Geographical Review

Extraction, Infrastructural Violence, & Dissent in Critical African Geographies

From Rwanda to Ghana, to Mozambique and Cameroon, we have witnessed the cyclical (re)appearance of media celebrations regarding the supposed empowering potential of extractive projects across Africa. These are anticipatory media and political conversations about the hypothetical windfall of extraction for this-or-that ‘local’ people. Too often corporate-led and state-sanctioned, these forms of extractive propaganda remain in an apolitical and ahistorical vacuum, disconnected from the histories of extractive displacement, dispossession, and damage. Yet these claims can be persuasive for adjacent communities, students, and political leaders alike, especially for emergent forms of extractivism like carbon offset markets (DeBoom 2021; Arko 2024) and the mining of critical minerals—cobalt, copper, graphite, lithium, etc.—touted as ‘environmentally friendly’, ‘climate neutral’, and ‘sustainable’ (Bond 2021; Dunlap, Verweijen & Tornel 2024).

Against celebratory rhetoric, present-day extractive projects perpetuate often acute environmental, economic, social, and political harm in African geographies. Geographers trace the ways in which modern extractive practices are established upon capitalist and colonial logics that permit the commodification of nature (Bond 2006) and people alike (Yusoff 2018; Murrey & Mollett 2023). Under the affectations of development and modernization in the last 50 years, authoritarian governments have worked alongside corporate and extractive industries to perpetuate extractive regimes, exacerbating ecological degradation, political disenfranchisement, economic exploitation and gendered marginalization (Mai-Bornu 2023). For these reasons, Tafadzwa Mushonga and James Ogude (2022: 1) refer to extractivism as ‘the intractable problem’ for African societies. Again and again, the capitalist processes that David Harvey (2004) terms ‘accumulation by dispossession’—capitalist growth through active and legalized forms of theft—converged with what Patricia McFadden (2008) calls ‘plunder as statecraft’—the governance practices, incentives systems, and legal structures designed primarily for the personal enrichment of a country’s political leadership. Within such neo-imperial contexts, geographers and social scientists have interrogated the parameters of autonomy and sovereignty (Watts 2014, 2019; Emel et al. 2011; Arboleda 2020), interrogating the possibilities for African states and leaders to do more than merely distribute extractive licenses, stockpile royalties charged for extractive projects (Chitonge 2025), or—in the cruelest neo-imperial arrangements—tolerate and perpetuate acts of violence against their citizens on behalf of extractive companies and the capitalist elite (le Billon 2001; Ibeanu & Luckham 2007; Azarvan 2010).

Across the continent, extractive and infrastructural violence are frequently mutually reinforcing and constituent—each having emerged and become entrenched through colonial and neocolonial extractive economies. Scholars have shown that material infrastructure—dams, buildings, pipelines, fiber optic cables, roadways, power lines, seaports, sewage systems, server farms, etc.—can function as active and passive mechanisms of exclusion or ‘infrastructural violence’ (Rodgers & O’Neill 2012). This includes by perpetuating forms of political and economic harm that harken back to colonial periods or which are built into the structures of settler colonialism (Spice 2018; Curley 2021), by acting as instruments of repression (González et al. 2024), through the intentional disruption, weaponization, and/or targeted sabotage of critical infrastructure (Puar 2017; Murrey 2023), and in the prioritization of capitalist infrastructures alongside the systematic neglect of and absence of political will for life-making and life-supporting infrastructures (Appel 2012)—infrastructures ‘otherwise’ that enable ‘sustenance and reproduction’ (Pasternak et al. 2022).

The dynamics of racial capitalism are at the core of continued patterns of extraction. In the Niger Delta, Omolade Adunbi (2025: 151) writes of ‘extractivism as whiteness’, where the remnants of the slave trade were supplanted by another form of commodification (oil extraction)—both of which are based upon a ‘form of capitalism that situates race at the center of its trading practices’. Murrey and Jackson (2019), in their examination of corporate and multilateral practices in the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline, establish the patterned persistence and political connotations of forms of ‘racialised localwashing’, in which extractive executives, pamphlets, and annual reports presume extraction occurs on behalf of ‘local’ people. These claims of ‘local’ betterment are racially coded— ventriloquist, paternalistic, and dehumanizing—and remain unquestioned precisely because they occur within global imperial racial capitalism, wherein even spectacular racialized dispossessions are routinized. Ultimately, racialized localwashing functions to legitimize actually existing extractive violence in those very same ‘local’ Black, Indigenous, and African communities (ibid).

Building on these insights into racial capitalism and its attendant forms of infrastructural and extractive violence, our Special Issue of African Geographical Review seeks to bring together critical, Marxist, anti-imperialist, and/or feminist readings of infrastructure, extractivism, and economic and ecological liberation across the continent.

Our SI aims to foreground the potentials, possibilities, and practices of resistance against infrastructural and extractive violence in African societies—whether through direct confrontation, legal struggles, or decentralized and protracted practices of ‘slow dissent’. We invite critical engagements with extractive violence, the roles of infrastructure in liberation and repression, and the possibilities of anti-imperial, anti-extractive, and/or Marxist paradigms that center non-Western epistemologies, ecological justice, and the lived experiences of communities of struggle. Work in geography and political ecology has brought attention to the important roles of Ken Saro-Wiwa, Wangari Maathai, and Fikile Ntshangase in environmental and anti-extractive activism. At the same time, however, geographers recognize the exceptionalism of resistance (van Teijlingen 2022), the authoritarian crack-down on organized activism in African countries following the ‘Arab Spring’ (including the passage of anti-terrorism laws prohibiting non-authorized public assembly), and the dangers and difficulties of movements against injustice. We are therefore attentive to forms of ‘slow dissent’ (Murrey 2016, 2022, 2024), understood as ‘the amalgamation of intergenerational, horizontal, and often fragmentary practices and narratives of resistance within the longue durée of authoritarian racial capitalism and militarized counterrevolution.’ By engaging with forms of slow dissent, we recognize the convergence of multiple, simultaneous struggles rather than focusing exclusively on a single resistance agenda or objective (ibid). This might include through institutional channels, forms of ‘slow environmental justice’ (Conde et al. 2023), or through decentralized, informal opposition that reconfigures resistance beyond immediate confrontation. We seek examinations of slow, cumulative acts of opposition that emerge through affective, cultural, and epistemic refusals of capitalist extractivism: How might fragmentary, persistent, out-of-sight practices and forms of dissent challenge extractive infrastructures and reimagine anti-extractive futures—and, might they coalesce into a broader, transformative movement against capitalist extraction? We are also interested in considering the potentials for cross-fertilization(s) across geographical frameworks: this might include work on neo-extractivism and/or body-territory scholarships pioneered in Latin American feminist decolonial thought (Zaragocin & Caretta 2021), or work in black geographies on plantation logics (McKittrick 2013), incompleteness (Nyamnjoh 2015; Okoye 2024), invisible/unrecognized epistemes, refusals of ‘damage-centered’ research, and more.

Abstract submissions are invited, for but not limited to:

• Extractive infrastructures and the persistence of colonial and capitalist violence: How do infrastructural networks—such as mining corridors, oil pipelines, hydroelectric projects, etc.—reinforce neocolonial governance and capitalist accumulation? This might include ethnographic work on the intersections of extraction, state violence, and corporate hegemony, as well as the lived experiences of communities exposed to infrastructural harm.
• Slow dissent and the politics of resistance in extractive geographies: How might we trace the longue durée of resistance and/or ‘slow dissent’ in the predominantly agrarian and para-urban communities directly situated within extractive landscapes? What are the possibilities and limitations of informal, dispersed, and temporally extended modes of opposition? Contributions may explore everyday acts of refusal, legal struggles hindered by the dynamics of ‘slow environmental justice’ (Lopez & Orihuela 2024); alternative epistemologies of resistance that challenge extractive logics and infrastructures; and the politics of knowledge within critical African geographies, including epistemic injustice and extractivism (Karmakar 2023) or the contemporary marginalization of rural geographies within social movement studies (despite the historical significance of the countryside for anti-imperial and anti-colonial resistance movements; Mkandawire 2002; also Christensen 2017), for example.
• Infrastructural violence and the body-territory nexus: Drawing from body-territory scholarship in Latin America and elsewhere (Glockner et al. 2023; Postar & Behzadi 2024), how might we (re)conceptualize the entanglement of human and non-human experiences in African geographies of extraction?—In ways that do not perpetually recenter black and/or African suffering nor render Black and Brown communities and people as objects of spectacle (McKittrick 2011; Daley 2013).
• Alternatives to capitalist extraction: Submissions may center Marxist and feminist political ecologies, ‘decolonial infrastructures’, and/or strategies for dismantling entrenched systems of capitalist exploitation. How ware extractive infrastructures repurposed or dismantled in service of anti-imperial or decolonial futures (Pasternak et al. 2022)? How might solidarities between African and Black geographies (Daley & Murrey 2022) offer intellectual interventions that can contribute to moving beyond extractivism?