After many years of running oil palm plantations, the world’s largest food company Unilever sold the lands it had grabbed mostly to foreign companies. The communities living next to and within Unilever’s former plantations are amongst the poorest in Africa. Now they are mobilizing to fight their grabbed land.

Ten years after acquiring the Chergui gas concession in Kerkennah through a corrupt deal, and five years after Tunisia’s uprising for bread, freedom and social justice, the British oil and gas company Petrofac faces growing discontent on the island. In the first two weeks of April, Kerkennah was the scene of violent police repression of protests against the oil company.

President Robert Mugabe is not solely to blame for the economic problems facing Zimbabwe as many in the western world have claimed. 

South African society’s conflict with a mainstay of the country’s corporate economy – resource extraction – is permanently on display in the platinum, gold and coalfields in the north and north-east of the country.

Beyond being inconvenient for knowing too much, Gustavo Castro Soto falls into the repressive government’s category of public enemy. Like Cáceres, Castro has been a vocal opponent of dam construction on indigenous rivers, as well as of the broad powers given transnational corporations and the local elite to plunder democracy and the riches of nature.