Ongoing Struggles for Resource Control: Economic Sovereignty and Neo-Imperial Backlash

Contemporary movements for African Resource Sovereignty 

The battle for Africa’s resources has long been a battle over who controls the means of production and accumulation. In recent years, the national governments in Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea, Niger, and beyond have actively reasserted sovereign control over resources and advanced explicitly anti-imperial governance movements. In a deal estimated at $80 million USD, Burkina Faso nationalized two gold mines, Boungou and Wahgnion, stripping ownership from London-based Endeavour Mining. Niger revoked the operating licenses of Vancouver-based GoviEx Uranium and Paris-based Orano. Mali introduced a new mining code that will require the government to maintain a 35 per cent interest in mining. In addition, Mali accused Canada’s Barrick Gold of money laundering and financing terrorism and, as of February 2025, is working to negotiate a US $200 million payment for back taxes. On the 25th of February 2025, the DRC announced it would suspend mining activities for four months, including cobalt mining (the country provides 80 per cent of the world’s cobalt).  In the histories of entrenched neocolonial extractivism as a mechanism of capital appropriation through legalized plunder (what David Harvey termed ‘accumulation by dispossession’ and Nancy Fraser called ‘cannibal capitalism’)—these geopolitical moves signal a fresh round of anti-imperial economic liberation in francophone West Africa. 

However, the histories of resource nationalism in Latin America and the more recent “new extractivism” of Bolivia’s Morales and Correa’s Ecuador reveal embedded and normalized practices of displacement, dispossession, and ecological destruction (Veltmeyer and Petras 2014)—and Pan-African thinkers were among the first to expose the constraints and weaknesses of nationalism in post-colonial African states (Cabral 1974). Issa Shivji (2006: 15) contended, ‘Without a Pan-African vision, there is the danger that the resurgence of nationalism as a reaction to the new imperial assault can degenerate into narrow, parochial, national chauvinism and even ethnicism and racism’. In a recent interview, Patricia McFadden argued that the core of Black Nationalism is ‘a patriarchal capacity that men learn as males…to collude…and to compromise the integrity of other humans… We need a deeper, more unequivocal critique of Nationalism, so that we can remove ourselves from it and step into new worlds that await us’. As governments importantly reclaim control over natural wealth, the challenge remains for resource nationalism to move beyond rhetoric to deliver grassroots economic liberation without perpetuating cycles of inequality and environmental harm.

Neo-imperial backlash 

Recent movements for resource sovereignty have not gone without response in the imperial core. These and related extractive restructurings and the bold steps to abrogate extractive contracts have triggered a new wave of dismissals in Western policy circles and media—including the near-unanimous description of the West African region as a ‘coup belt’, and characterizations of its states as ‘hostile’, ‘unstable’, ‘jingoistic’, and ‘disorderly’. Extractive corporations and mining firms have employed risk consultants to assess the probable damage of resource nationalism to their investment portfolios. Verisk Maplecroft, a  firm that focuses on economic forecasting and global risk intelligence, publishes a Resource Nationalism Index (RNI), which to its website, the RNI ‘measures the risk of expropriation, the imposition of more stringent fiscal regimes, and pressure for companies to source goods and services from local providers’. In the Index, Verisk Maplecroft claims that 30 countries have ‘witnessed a significant increase in resource nationalism risks’, with the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe listed as ‘extreme risks’ in 2019. It claims that ‘creeping resource nationalism’ is a central ‘threat to operators’, with DRC accused of ‘squeezing investors’ with a ‘punitive’ 10 percent royalty on coltan, germanium and cobalt. 

 Report after report endorses the revival of the so-called ‘stabilization clause’ that require states to compensate private firms for any loss of revenue, as well as dispute resolution clauses that enable corporations to bypass local courts. The stability clause has taken multiple forms over the years, including the economic equilibrium clause, balancing clause, or renegotiation clause—each requiring parties to renegotiate terms so that the extractive project achieves the same economic effect as was originally agreed upon. These agreements were first trialed in Latin American countries by US firms in the 1930s. In the terms of such contracts, the nation state must provide sufficient ‘stabilization’ for the private company’s continued profits and accumulation. This means that taxation rates are frozen for the duration of the project and countries are prohibited from making unilateral changes or modifications in labor, property, import provisions, and more in the terms of the agreement. Legal scholars describe the period of the 1980s to the early 2000s as a period of stability clause ‘hibernation’ (or disappearance)—it is not that the stability clause itself disappeared (it did not), but rather that it vanished from public debate due to its pervasive normalization, alongside the tendency for corporate-state debates to be constrained in secrecy and confidentiality during this period. The ‘hibernation’ of stability clauses occurred in the context of extensive economic liberalization (Amin 2003), the waning impact of Marxist politics and nationalist movements, and the collapse of the Soviet Union—all of which resulted in the countries of the African continent having reduced bargaining power. For example, the oil consortium initially comprising the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline project (negotiated, engineered, and constructed from 1998 to 2003), demanded the implementation of a stability clause in the agreement that would prevent the Chadian government from “impinging on ExxonMobil’s rights and economic benefits”—it was stipulated within the clause that the oil stability convention would exceed Chadian domestic law. I have worked in communities along the pipeline in Cameroon for the last 13 years, documenting and analyzing the entangled forms of bodily/spiritual, ecological, political, and infrastructural violence that people have experienced, despite the consortium’s attempts to mitigate and obscure such violence. 

 In corporate extraction and foreign direct investment more broadly, stability clauses, in practice, have been tantamount to imperialism. The objective of the stability clause is to limit the practice and expression of national sovereignty—legal, fiscal, and economic. A Nigerian legal scholar describes freezing stabilization clauses as ‘invalid’ on the basis that they foster ‘impermissible interference with the host state’s sovereign rights’ (Elebiju 2012: 7). And indeed, the Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Law of Nigeria was declared unconstitutional by the Federal High Court of Nigeria. Samin Amin (2003) exposed these sorts of exploitative arrangements as ‘just stable enough’ to permit capitalist accumulation—yet not stable enough to promote social, political, or ecological justice. In practice, stability clauses have been pressured upon sovereign states, as corporate actors threaten to withdraw the project financing that is frequently required for the extractive project to begin. 

The US state and corporate eliminations of inclusion, diversity, and environment

Imperial states continue to seek hegemonic resource control, including by reshoring supply chains nearer the global imperial core. Conservative think tanks and policy institutes anticipate that the global minerals and metals sector will experience ‘amplified volatilities’ under US President Donald Trump—although these same outlets pundits also frequently work to spin crisis into profit (Klein 2007). It is anticipated that he will dismantle the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which was the first major, comprehensive US policy directed simultaneously at healthcare, climate justice, and corporate tax reform (introducing a modest 15 percent standard corporate tax rate). On the first day of his second term in office, he introduced an executive order that he termed “Unleashing American Energy”, blocking federal grants for clean energy, emission reduction, rooftop solar, and more. Despite the current oversupply of oil in the global market, Trump triumphantly avowed in the first days of his second term, “drill, baby, drill!” While the oil majors have their own financial incentives to decline Trump’s enthusiastic proclamation, the withdrawal of the US from important climate agreements and the sweeping dismissal of environmental regulation and monitoring fosters a geopolitical context in which unfettered capitalist extraction is not only accepted but fêted. British Petroleum, for example, announced what it called a “fundamentally reset strategy”—a re-transition/regression from renewable energy investments to an intensification in oil and gas expenditures (by $10 billion) into 2027.

Alongside the defunding of clean energy, the White House has used a combination of coercion and leverage to implement a sweeping elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and by state actors and private corporations in the United States. The US President admonished private corporations: federal funding will not go to any corporation, state, or institution that has been “indoctrinated” or “infiltrated” with the ideology of DEI. All US federal agencies (the US Department of Education, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, etc.) alongside major corporations (Warner Brothers, Bank of America, Pepsi, PBS, Google, Amazon, etc.) are rushing to paint over photographs of women in the hallways of their buildings, delete inclusion sections from annual reports, and remove DEI statements and initiatives from their webpages. (As I write this on the 2nd of March 2025, the DEI websites of major fossil fuel firms, including ExxonMobil’s DEI page, Chevron’s DEI page, Shell’s DEI page, are still active.) 

 Many hegemonic institutions, organizations, and governments are removing—indeed, purging—their nonbinding commitments to diversity and inclusion and environment protection. Marxist and anti-imperial thinkers and activists have long been critical of the superficial inclusions of gender, racial, and eco-justice in corporate structures—alternately referred to as performative forms of whitewashing, localwashing, genderwashing, and greenwashing. But what will be the fallout and consequences when now corporations and institutions of higher education are saying: okeydokey, we are scrapping even the illusion of inclusion and ecojustice (and development aid)?.

These precedents have global implications for all sorts of multinational firms for what they perceive is politically expedient. These top-down directives from the White House and its affiliated billionaire class are being done under the guise that DEI was a discriminating ideological project aimed at disempowering white men, and which resulted in ‘unqualified’ individuals filling posts. It has fed into the illusion that DEI was aimed at (or effected a) marginalizing white men. The extension of this logic is that black, brown, women, immigrant, disabled, LGBTQ, etc. people employed in those sectors did not merit their posts to begin with. When two aircrafts collided in the first weeks of his presidency, Trump speculated that DEI was the cause. With no evidence, he speculated aloud that disabled or marginalized people had been allowed into the Federal Aviation Administration and were accountable for the accident. On one hand, the problem is in the totalitarian-style rollout of its elimination. On the other, DEI is not being eliminated on the basis that it was never a sufficiently transformative paradigm to begin with. Rather its elimination validates and emboldens practices of white masculine supremacy. With resource nationalism on the rise and the imperial core scrambling to maintain control, we are witnessing shifts in strategies and forms of global imperial power. 

 As civil society and NGO funding channels dry up, and corporate and state actors are emboldened to overlook even shallow forms of inclusion and environmental wellbeing, social scientists on the African continent will increasingly need to look outside of the NGO-industrial complex for supplemental income. Our colleagues on the continent have long been structurally reliant on consulting gigs and external research projects to see them through monthly survival—what Issa Shivji called the “neoliberal offensive.” As international aid dries up, corporate and extractive interests will remain across Africa. As a result, social scientist consulting, surveying, mediating, and providing forms of labor for corporate, capitalist, and extractive ventures—global dynamics that my colleague Nicholas A. Jackson and I have been tracking for the last few years—will likely be more seductive and economically indispensable than before. To counterbalance these pressures and prevent the further extension of corporate entanglements in African knowledge creation, states should prioritize the supplementation of salaries for teachers and academics, ensuring that scholars are not forced into exploitative forms of consulting work. Academic leaders must promote and support solidarity and remunerative collaboration with African academics. Pan-African scholars will continue to work in solidarity, including by pursuing and fostering opportunities for economic redistribution and the revitalization of African higher education.

Amber Murrey, a member of the International Advisory Board of Pambazuka News, is an Associate Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford and a 2024/25 Fulbright Scholar at Université de Yaoundé 1 in Cameroon. Her award-winning research explores political ecologies in Cameroon, focusing on "slow dissent"—the ways communities resist and navigate intergenerational and extractive violence over time and place. She is the co-author of Learning Disobedience: Decolonizing Development Studies (with Patricia Daley, 2023) and the editor of A Certain Amount of Madness: The Life, Politics, and Legacies of Thomas Sankara (2018).