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A provocative reassessment of the relationship between states and environmental politics in Africa From climate-related risks such as crop failure and famine to longer-term concerns about sustainable urbanization, environmental justice, and biodiversity conservation, African states face a range of environmental issues. As Carl Death demonstrates, the ways in which they are addressing them have important political ramifications, and challenge current understandings of green politics. Death draws on almost a decade of research to reveal how central African environmental politics are to the transformation of African states.

"The aim of this book, by providing a set of conceptual tools drawn from critical theory, is to open up questions and new problems and new research agendas for the study of environmental politics"--

The aim of this book is to review central concepts in the study of environmental politics and to open up new questions, problems, and research agendas in the field. The volume does so by drawing on a wide range of approaches from critical theory to poststructuralism, and spanning disciplines including international relations, geography, sociology, history, philosophy, anthropology, and political science. The 28 chapters cover a range of global and local studies, illustrations and cases. These range from the Cochabamba conference in Bolivia to climate camps in the UK; UN.

This volume is a theoretically-informed examination of the political consequences of the World Summit on Sustainable Development. Death draws on Foucauldian governmentality literature to argue that the Johannesburg Summit was a key site for the refashioning of sustainable development as advanced liberal government.

The international politics of climate change invokes the imagination of various potential global futures, ranging from techno-optimist visions of ecological modernisation to apocalyptic nightmares of climate chaos. This article argues that most dominant framings of the future in climate policy imaginaries tend to be depoliticised and linear visions of universal, homogenous time, with little spatio-temporal or ecological plurality. This article aims to convince IR scholars of climate politics that Africanfuturist climate fiction novels can contribute to the decolonisation of climate politics through radically different socio-climatic imaginaries to those that dominate mainstream imaginations of climate futures. The Africanfuturist climate fiction novels of authors such as Nnedi Okorafor, Lauren Beukes and Doris Lessing imagine different spaces, temporalities, ecologies and politics. Reading them as climate theory, they offer the possibility of a more decolonised climate politics, in which issues of land and climate justice, loss and damage, extractive political economies and the racialised and gendered violence of capitalism are central.

This article argues that a 'counter-conducts approach', drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, can be used to disaggregate the concept of resistance and highlight how some resistant practices work to subvert dominant ways of being. One of the features of a counter-conducts approach is an attention to the interpenetration of forms of power and resistance, governmentality and alternative modes of subjectification. Such an approach can be used to interpret forms of social protest in new ways, particularly in terms of the ways in which they facilitate or hinder ethical self-reflection and militant lives. Examples are provided from contemporary South Africa, specifically the Occupy Umlazi protest and a township youth movement known as 'izikhothane' or pexing. In very different ways these protests are public assertions that 'we are not like that'. As such they each challenge mainstream social values, yet they also have quite problematic implications for progressive politics and radical theorists.

Whilst the 'green state debate' has primarily focused on a narrow range of usual suspects in the developed world, the debate can be enriched and challenged by considering more diverse cases. Viewing African states from a green state perspective invites empirical reassessment of the geographical scope of the concept, and introduces a new set of conceptual questions about the political significance of transitions in environmental governance. Ecological modernisation theory has largely neglected African states because it is assumed that African states are weak, failing, or failed, and that environmentalism is a post-materialist phenomenon. Whilst both assumptions can be challenged empirically, a biopolitical perspective on the African environmental state, drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, can both position African state development within a longer-term context and challenge some assumptions of ecological modernisation. Examples from Egypt, South Africa, and the Kavango-Zambezi Trans-frontier Conservation Area highlight underestimated continuities in environmental state practices. The international and transnational drivers of the green state in Africa are emphasised, as well as the political dangers of a green 'state building' project.