Short Abstract

The panel explores how indigeneity is mobilized in Africa’s conservation and environmental struggles as an instrument of legal emancipation and as a mechanism of renewed enclosure, interrogating it through histories of resource dispossession and the political construction of indigenous identities.

Long Abstract

International law and global conservation governance have framed “indigeneity” as an enabling position, framing identity into a resource to contest dispossession against state and corporate extractivism, including in Africa. Yet, Africanist historical and anthropological scholarship has criticised the same category as an externally imposed colonial construct rooted in administrative ethnicization and fixed native/settler dichotomies, flattening the continent’s histories of mobility and belonging (Kuper 2003;Mamdani 2012;Pelican 2009).

The same fracture reappears within law: while the African Commission and Court recognise marginalised communities as indigenous, national laws evade the term, reframe it, or explicitly refuse indigenous status. Bringing international and comparative law into conversation with African history, anthropology and Political Ecology, we seek to problematize the controversy surrounding indigeneity in African Studies by examining how legal and policy approaches interact with the continent’s specific histories (Hodgson 2011) and asking how indigeneity can operate both as an instrument of emancipation and ecological stewardship, and as a potential mechanism of re-enclosure, by fixing identities through which access to land and resources is governed.

We therefore invite contributions that move across — and between — disciplines, willing to understand how indigeneity is claimed across Africa.Who defines and controls its criteria, and in whose interest? Does recognition genuinely expand rights, or reproduce tribalized classifications of autochthony functional to external governance agendas? And how far does the legal translation of indigenous rights crystallize the Eurocentric myth of the “ecologically noble savage” conditioning land rights and environmental standing on proof of an immutable, pristine harmony with nature?

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