Introduction

This chapter speaks to an intractable problem of resource exploitation and dispossession that has plagued Africa for several decades. Set within a political ecology framework and broader understandings of the resource relationship between the industrialised global north and developing global south, the chapter argues that the dispossessing nature of resource exploitation is at the core of what defines the pervasive nature of Africa’s environmental struggles. Against this argument, the chapter demonstrates that these struggles are broadly structured around environmental (in)justice, violent capitalocenes, repression of indigenous knowledge, and climate change. It ends by introducing the range of chapters expanding on these four themes.