Political Economy of Resource, Human Security and Environmental Conflicts in Africa


Book Description

This book shows the push and pull effects between resources, human security and conflicts in Africa. It recognizes the need for resources in Africa to be processed into finished goods in order to influence global market and redefine the pattern of trade relations with powerful countries of Asia, America and Europe in shaping the destiny and future of African countries. The achievement of this laudable objective is plagued by the security challenges which are directly or indirectly linked to resource-related conflicts rocking most of the resource endowed countries in the continent, thereby threatening global peace and security. To deal with this menace in the continent, it requires global co-operation and support of foreign governments, international organizations, international non-government organizations, governments of host countries and its citizens. The book presents the cases and experiences of countries that are endowed with resource, as well as have experienced different forms of human insecurity and have witnessed environmental conflicts in its analysis, which make the discourse interesting and quite educating.




Climate Change, Human Security and Violent Conflict


Book Description

Severe droughts, damaging floods and mass migration: Climate change is becoming a focal point for security and conflict research and a challenge for the world’s governance structures. But how severe are the security risks and conflict potentials of climate change? Could global warming trigger a sequence of events leading to economic decline, social unrest and political instability? What are the causal relationships between resource scarcity and violent conflict? This book brings together international experts to explore these questions using in-depth case studies from around the world. Furthermore, the authors discuss strategies, institutions and cooperative approaches to stabilize the climate-society interaction.




Human Security and Mutual Vulnerability


Book Description

Human Security and Mutual Vulnerability: The global political economy of development and underdevelopment (Second Edition)




Human Security and Sustainable Development in East Africa


Book Description

This book investigates contemporary human security issues in East Africa, setting forth policy recommendations and a research agenda for future studies. Human security takes a people-centered rather than state-centered approach to security issues, focusing on whether people feel safe, free from fear, want, and indignity. This book investigates human security in East Africa, encompassing issues as diverse as migration, housing, climate change, displacement, food security, aflatoxins, land rights, and peace and conflict resolution. In particular, the book showcases innovative original research from African scholars based on the continent and abroad, and together the contributors provide policy recommendations and set forth a human security research agenda for East Africa, which encompasses Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Djibouti. As well as being useful for policy makers and practitioners, this book will interest researchers across African Studies, Security Studies, Environmental Studies, Political Science, Global Governance, International Relations, and Human Geography. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license




Human Rights and the Environment in Africa


Book Description

The relationship between human rights and the environment, as evidenced by the recent UN Resolution on the human right to a healthy environment, is a topical, fascinating, uneasy, and increasingly urgent one. This timely collection explores the inextricable relationship between human rights and the environment as a critical lens for understanding and addressing key human rights and environmental issues confronting Africa. The work explores theoretical, philosophical, doctrinal, and empirical research to interrogate and provide clarity on how and whether the human rights-based approach to environmental protection and policy implications has been effective in enhancing environmental protection and sustainability in Africa. It brings together an elite group of African and international experts to investigate the increasing connectivity and problems with African human rights, environmental governance, and the quest for sustainability. The book is divided into thematic clusters, including: the right of vulnerable communities to sustainability; climate change, the right to development and natural resource governance; corporate environmental responsibility and sustainability; the philosophy of environmental ethics and theories of human rights approaches to environmental governance; procedural environmental rights; the role of the judiciary in environmental protection; and desertification. These themes provide a structure to investigate and clarify specific fundamental questions on Africa’s environmental governance paradigm. This innovative contribution provides an interdisciplinary approach to the philosophical interrelationship and use of human rights approaches to ensure and enhance environmental protection and sustainability. As such, the book will be of interest to African scholars, researchers and students in Human Rights Law, Environmental Studies, Political Science, Ecology and Conservation and Development Studies. It will also be a valuable resource for policymakers, governments, NGOs, practitioners, and all those interested in African environmental governance.




Political Economy of Colonial Relations and Crisis of Contemporary African Diplomacy


Book Description

The book presents a historical account of the colonial foundation of African economy and diplomacy. It reveals how the colonial companies and their agents penetrated different parts of Africa and entrenched Western colonialism and imperialism. Ironically, the arrival of these colonial companies became a driver of colonial labour migration as the educated and few privileged African people have to move towards the location of the colonial companies in order to eke-out improved standard of living. It presents the dynamics of import and export trade as promoted by the colonial companies. Consequently, the second part of the book raised the nature of relations amongst some independent African states. First, it reveals the deep-rooted challenge of poverty, migration problem, xenophobia in South Africa and resource conflicts within sovereign border areas of Nigeria and Cameroon as well as the Ethiopian dam crisis with Egypt, as some negative effects of colonialism on some African states. Secondly, it advocated for the advancement of African sports diplomacy, balancing of Chinese African trade diplomacy and improved labour migration within Africa as some paths to sustainable diplomacy in continent.




Resource Conflict and Environmental Relations in Africa


Book Description

The book discusses the failure of many African governments in providing the social needs of the masses, thereby placing the citizenry on the desperate quest for economic resources. Unfortunately, in many African States, mineral resources are owned, explored and marketed by the machinery of the state. The problem arises when the masses begin to challenge state access and ownership of resources that are domiciled within their ancestral land, communities, and constituencies. Often the challenge and resistance to state ownership of resources is generated by communal or group sense of exploitation, negligence and widespread poverty in the face of high resource endowment and waste by the government officials. Paradoxically, in Niger Delta of Nigeria, as discussed in the book, the state has unleashed unlimited might upon all social groups and agitators, thereby leading to the increased act of taking arms by such groups. When the informal resource agitators succeed in arming themselves, they begin to demand social and environmental justice, thereby leading to mass armed conflict between them and the government security agencies. Sometimes, the confrontation could be between them and other rival local resource actors in the informal sector of their country’s economy bearing in mind that the resources within their jurisdiction have become the central determinant of national commonwealth. It is at that state of desperado to control access, extraction and sale of natural resources in a State, by different armed groups that the process of natural resources extraction qualifies as the most visible cause of conflicts and crises around the African continent that is the centrepiece of the book. This is quite understandable given that mineral resource is a gift of nature; and nature is that phenomenon that every human, group and nation claim to represent, or, believe to represent them.







African Agency in International Politics


Book Description

This book analyses the rapidly increasing role of African states, leaders and other political actors in international politics in the 21st Century. In contrast to the conventional approach of studying how external actors impacted on Africa’s international relations, this book seeks to open up a new approach, focusing on the impact of African political actors on international politics. It does this by analysing African agency – the degree to which African political actors have room to manoeuvre within the international system and exert influence internationally, and the uses they make of that room for manoeuvre. Bringing together leading scholars from Africa and Europe to explore the role and conception of African Agency, this book addresses a wide range of issues, from relations with western and non-western donors, Africa’s role in the UN and World Trade Organisation, negotiations over climate change, trade agreements with the European Union, regional diplomatic strategies, the character and extent of African state agency, and agency within corporate social responsibility initiatives. African Agency in International Politics will be of interest to scholars and students of Africa’s international relations, African politics, development, geography, diplomacy, trade, the environment, political science and security studies.




Research Handbook on International Law and Human Security


Book Description

This comprehensive Research Handbook considers the place of human security, both in practice and as a concept within international law, examining the preconditions for and consequences of applying human security to international legal thinking and practice. It also proposes a future international law in which human security is central to the law’s purpose. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.