Short Abstract

This panel examines how African resource frontiers are governed through layered authority, informal finance, local claims, state regulation and global markets, showing how sovereignty is practised, negotiated and contested in everyday extraction.

Long Abstract

Resource frontiers have long shaped political authority, livelihoods and environmental change across Africa. Yet they are rarely governed by the state alone. In mining zones, forest economies, energy-transition supply chains, land frontiers and informal markets, authority is assembled through changing relations among state agencies, local communities, chiefs, landholders, workers, brokers, buyers, financiers, companies and transnational actors. This panel asks how such frontiers reveal the everyday workings of sovereignty in Africa.

Rather than treating informality as disorder or state absence, the panel invites papers that examine how rules, claims and obligations are produced in practice. Who authorises access to land and resources? How are labour, protection, credit and markets organised? Why does enforcement often fall on visible workers while sponsors, buyers and intermediaries remain less exposed? How do global demands for gold, timber, oil, lithium, rare earth elements and other strategic resources reshape local authority and environmental governance?

The panel welcomes historical, ethnographic, political-economic, legal and environmental approaches. It is especially interested in papers that connect grounded African case studies to wider debates on sovereignty, extraction, informality, formalisation, environmental change, community participation, resource justice and global supply chains. By placing diverse African resource frontiers in conversation, the panel contributes to the ECAS2027 theme of “African Prisms” by showing how extraction refracts power through multiple actors, scales and historical experiences.

Keywords: resource frontiers; sovereignty; extraction; informality; mining; environmental governance; political economy; Africa.

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