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This volume deals with the consequences of climate change and issues of international climate policy relating to Africa from a social science perspective. The contributions by international authors question dominant political approaches and key concepts of the climate debate. They explain how the effects of climate change are linked to existing social, economic and political-institutional structures and action by the State. The authors show how social movements in Africa shape climate policy «from below». The volume serves as an introduction into climate change in Africa. It wants to stimulate a critical debate on dominant strategies and points out that there can be no simple answers to the complex socio-ecological and political challenges linked to climate change in Africa.

This book empirically discusses recent struggles over land and mining, exploring state-society relations conflicts on various scales. In contrast with the existing literature, analyses in this volume deliberately focus on large-scale land use changes both in relation to the expansion of industrial mining and to agro-industry. The authors contend that there are significant parallels between contestations over different variants of resource extractivism, as they reflect the same global trends and processes. Chapters draw on critical theoretical approaches from political ecology, political economy, spatial theory, contentious politics, and the study of democracy. The authors not only provide empirical insights on actual resource struggles from different world regions based on in-depth field research, but also contribute to theory-building by linking concepts from various critical approaches to one another, developing a perspective for analysing struggles over resources related to current global crisis phenomena.