Abstract
Globalization continues to intensify the exchanges of people, resources, capital, and technologies, expanding the roles and influence of both state and non-state actors. A by-product of this is the expansion of the political and economic will of multinational actors and their use of political power to impose social, civic, and literal death onto ethnic/racially marginalized communities throughout the Global South for capital accumulation. Countries still navigating their colonial past, often find their continued legacy of export in the form of “extractive zones”. Indigenous communities, often confined to the margins of the modern nation-state system, continue to be an advocate for justice against national and corporate demands for extraction from vulnerable lands and freshwater composites. The resulted injustice comes in the form of underdevelopment and social death. States, such as Nigeria, upon gaining independence, sought to navigate the free-market and use natural resources such as oil as a vehicle to wealth, multinational actors such as Shell Royal Dutch company were permitted to continue practices that disregarded the human rights of ethnic minorities and indigenous communities through militarism, land grabs, and extraction infrastructures creating a site of necropolitics. Despite this, Ogoni communties, continue to fight for inclusion and autonomy using politics reflective of their ecological and cultural relationship to the Niger Delta. This research explores the ways local communities seek to challenge injustices of a neoliberal global system that thrives from their exclusion, and how they build collective political power through their social-ecological context.
Presenters
Nicholas JohnsonStudent, Global Inclusion & Social Development , University of Massachusetts Boston, Armed Forces Americas, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2021 Special Focus—The Opportunities of Crisis: Resilience and Change in World History
KEYWORDS
Racial,Capitalism,Neoliberalism,Extraction,Indigeneity,Resilience,Environmentalism
