Paper short abstract:

The paper addresses two intertwined developments - the global imperative of climate action and the rise of social movements across the globe demanding low-carbon transitions and phasing-out of fossil fuels – and focuses on the environmental movement demanding a coal phase-out in South Africa.

Paper long abstract:

The global imperative of climate action, as agreed upon at international climate conferences, calls for a global low-carbon transition and a phase-out of fossil fuels. Increasingly, social movements across the globe demand more ambitious and faster transitions.

These two intertwined global developments can both also be seen in South Africa: South Africa has a highly coal-intensive electricity system and thus faces the challenge to phase-out coal. As a country with a long and rich history of protest, among them environmental protests, we currently also see the rise of climate protests taking place in South Africa.

The paper asks how social movements, such as the South African climate movement, frame the low-carbon transition and how they mobilize for their objectives of a just transition, which includes taking into account the interests of workers as well as environmental concerns and commitments to climate policies.

Drawing on qualitative research conducted across the country, the paper focuses on debates of social movements in transition processes and the roles that social movements play in them. Thus, it analyses how social movements demanding a low-carbon transition imagine the low-carbon future and the pathways to achieve this as well as which practices the social movement applies to achieve its goal.

Theoretically, the paper combines social movement literature and transition literature. With this, it contributes to the literature on low-carbon transitions – a literature that is so far dominated by Global North case studies – and to the understanding of agency of social movements in such transitions.

Paper short abstract:

How do inhabitants of West-African coastal cities perceive and react to the socio-ecological violence of climate change? This paper will show how questioning day-to-day activism and practices of contestation in two vulnerable cities can uncover political and social changes at the Anthropocene’s era.

Paper long abstract:

The IPCC report warns that the Gulf of Guinea is among the regions of the world most exposed to climate change. The coastal cities of Lagos and Cotonou are vulnerable, as their rapid urban growth is taking place between the lagoon and the ocean.

Urban Political Ecology has shown that environmental change is intrinsically a social and political process with socially differentiated consequences (Myers, 2016, Ernston and Swyngedouw, 2018). In Lagos and Cotonou, urban engineering projects embedded in neoliberal practices of urban growth are developed with an intention to protect the coastal settlements from the damages of water. Meanwhile coastal populations are seen mainly as passive and vulnerable actors.

I want to show in this paper how understanding climate change as a socio-ecological violence (Silver, 2018) and shifting from normative perceptions of vulnerability and resilience, can uncover quite invisible processes of contestations and resistances. Hence, this paper will present my double focus to enquire the political transformations and social changes at the Anthropocene's era. First, analysing and comparing mode of actions and social positions of the few environmental activists in the two cities can reveal the political role of direct collective action in the socio-natural processes. Second, people's perceptions and knowledges of environmental and urban changes are key to understand the construction of identities and social and political alterities (Arango, Guitard, and Lavie. 2022) and forms of collective organisation to adapt to change can be understood as acts of resistance to socio-natural processes (Scott, 2019).

Paper short abstract:

In 2022, thousands protested against the UN peacekeeping force in the Congolese city of Goma. Through violent protest practices, these activists were effectively “worlding from below” by criticizing global regimes of violence and inscribing themselves in a postcolonial, violent mode of production.

Paper long abstract:

In July 2022, thousands of youth and activists protested against the presence of the UN peacekeeping force in the city of Goma, DR Congo. Instead of finding explanations in apocalyptic visions of violence and poverty in slums or areas marked by armed conflict, I look at how these young activists from urban peripheries inscribe themselves in a global future through violent practices of protest. Simultaneously able to deploy their bodies in rural insurgencies or urban protests, these activists embody the barracks as the organizing principle of the postmodern African city (Hoffman, 2011). In socially navigating their peripheral urban surroundings, they deploy shifting (violent) tactics to create new futures for themselves and their country. By invoking anti-colonial imagery in the figure of Lumumba and mobilizing practices associated with nationalist self-defense militias, they offer a critique of global regimes of violence while inscribing themselves in a postcolonial, violent mode of production. This paper is based on long-term ethnographic research among an activist youth groups in the urban periphery of Goma in the eastern DRC. I demonstrate that their activist practices are an example of “worlding from below” (Simone, 2001) in which youth critically analyze the intervention of global actors, locate it in larger histories of imperialism and carve out a space for themselves in the world. If we want to understand how African futures are shaped, we need to incorporate a relational spatial perspective that questions the boundaries between urban and rural or global and local.

Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on the grassroots socio-cultural practices of members of the Afro-Brazilian organisations in Nigeria. While negotiating the past, identity and agency, the group manifests in two areas: spatiality and subjectivity and gains an activist and politicized character

Paper long abstract:

The subject of the presentation, which is part of the research on the past and future as well as cultural heritage, is a comprehensive examination of the social and cultural practices of activist members of an Afro-Brazilian association in southern Nigeria. They create the discourse of the African future through specific cultural practices that are determinants of identity and meanings. Afro-Brazilians in Nigeria, including Nigerians with Brazilian surnames, identifying themselves with the descendants of Africans (mainly from West Africa and Angola), migrated from Brazil in the 19th and 20th centuries and settled on the West African coast. Currently, the representatives of the group have united in associations and organizations - Brazilian Descendants Association Lagos and Yoruba-Brazilian Descendants Renascimento Association, which both formally and informally work to popularize local heritage and exert social pressure for the correct interpretation of the past regarding the colonialism of the group's history and identity and agency. As I note, this is manifested in two areas: spatiality and subjectivity, which gains a politicized character, including in Lagos and Badagry, including indigenous secular and sacral architecture in the historic Popo-Aguda district located on Lagos Island, practicing holidays, celebrating festivals and carnivals. As I postulate, these activities can be considered grassroots forms of cultural activism. How is the past negotiated? What is the impact of young organisational leaders who are shaping the new discourse on origin, heritage and cultural memory?