Introduction

We are living through a world-historical conjuncture of rising corporate resource exploitation and resistance to this. The resistance struggles of displaced people against exploitation are multiple instances of a single world-historical process. Subsistence economies are being incorporated into global capitalism. Resources are being exploited on an unforeseen scale and with unimaginable speed to feed the globalizing world economy. New sources of transnational commodity and capital flows are being created. As investments such as industrial plantations displace huge natural forest, savanna and grassland landscapes in a matter of years, the socio-ecological relations between people and nature are being subjected to chaotic transformations.