Contribution short abstract

The poster explores historical and contemporary dynamics of the Lobito Corridor, advancing world-ecology in Africa to reveal how socio-ecological relations and infrastructure shape extractive frontiers, unsettling dominant development imaginaries.

Contribution long abstract

Spanning Angola, Zambia and the DRC, the Lobito Corridor emerged in 1902 as the Benguela Line channelled resources from the central African interior to colonial centres. Despite its historical and contemporary significance to the region and wider globalised value chains, there is limited empirical research on how the corridor’s infrastructure and socio-ecological relations produce and are produced by frontier logics of extraction. It’s contemporary revitalisation as a strategic route for local and global development positions the corridor at the forefront of renewed interest in Africa’s critical minerals. As foreign actors such as China and the U.S. compete for access, the corridor is a key site to investigate how geopolitical power, development narratives and socio-ecological relations are reorganised by capital.

While world-ecology offers a lens for understanding these processes of Cheap Nature through capitals long-durée, it has not been extended to the simultaneous analysis of mineral-intensive green capitalism in Africa, presenting an opportunity to advance the framework. This approach shifts focus from individual actors or discrete events to the enduring socio-ecological relations that structure development over time (Moore, 2015, p.46). Building on this theoretical grounding, the methodology that the project follow shall trace these patterns empirically, through interviews in the field, enabling an analysis of the Benguela Railway and the Lobito Corridor as sites where historical and material processes of accumulation and dispossession continue to shape the web of life.

This poster presents new empirical insights from the Lobito Corridor, showing how infrastructures and socio-ecological relations shape extractive frontiers in Africa.