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Human civilisation stands at an unimaginable precipice. The human past, leading up to today, has seen society develop under the conditions of the Holocene since 10000 BC. However – we are now in the Anthropocene, what Deleuze/Guattari term as the future rupturing the present. This book analyses the Anthropocene given four dimensions: ‘tool-enhancement’; ‘carbon trail’; ‘the phallocene’; and ‘atomic-time’. A mode of education and social change lies parallel to this mapping that tackles degrowth, changing consciousness, a Green Utopia, and building a critical-immanent model to realign current practices in the light of globalisation. This is the first book to put the philosophy of Deleuze/Guattari to work for the future, and our collective existence as a differentiated educational practice in the Anthropocene.
Histories of Claims and Conflict in a Kenyan Landscape
Pastoralists, ranchers of European descent, conservationists, smallholders, and land investors with political influence converge on the Laikipia plateau in Kenya. Land is claimed by all - the tactics differ. Private property rights are presented, histories of presence are told, charges of immorality are applied, fences are electrified and some resort to violence. The region, marked by enclosures, is left as a tense fragmented frontier.
Marie Gravesen embedded herself in the region prior to a wave of land invasions that swept the plateau leading up to Kenya’s 2017 general election. Through a rich telling of the history of Laikipia’s social, political and environmental dynamics, she invites a deeper understanding of the pre-election violence and general tensions as never done before.
The manuscript is a revised version of the author's dissertation accepted by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Cologne in 2018.
Morality and Marginality: Towards Sentient Conservation?
Volume Editors: , , and
Nature conservation in southern Africa has always been characterised by an interplay between Capital, specific understandings of Morality, and forms of Militarism, that are all dependent upon the shared subservience and marginalization of animals and certain groups of people in society. Although the subjectivity of people has been rendered visible in earlier publications on histories of conservation in southern Africa, the subjectivity of animals is hardly ever seriously considered or explicitly dealt with. In this edited volume the subjectivity and sentience of animals is explicitly included. The contributors argue that the shared human and animal marginalisation and agency in nature conservation in southern Africa (and beyond) could and should be further explored under the label of ‘sentient conservation’.

Contributors are Malcolm Draper, Vupenyu Dzingirai, Jan-Bart Gewald, Michael Glover, Paul Hebinck, Tariro Kamuti, Lindiwe Mangwanya, Albert Manhamo, Dhoya Snijders, Marja Spierenburg, Sandra Swart, Harry Wels.
Territory, Border and Infrastructure in Africa
Volume Editors: , , and
The edited collection Spatial Practices: Territory, Border and Infrastructure in Africa presents research findings from the German Research Council’s Priority Programme 1448 “Adaptation and Change in Africa” (2011-2018). At the heart of the volume are important new spatial practices that have emerged after the end of the Cold War in the fields of conflict, climate change, migration and urban development, to name but a few, and their ordering effects with regard to social relations. These findings bear particular relevance for the co-production of territorialities and sovereignties, for borders and migrations, as well as infrastructures and orders.

Contributors are: Sabine Baumgart, Andrea Behrends, Marc Boeckler, Martin Doevenspeck, Ulf Engel, Claudia Gebauer, Karsten Giese, Katharina Heitz Tokpa, Shahadat Hossain, Anna Hüncke, Gabriel Klaeger, Kelly Si Miao Liang, Andreas Mehler, Felix Müller, Detlef Müller-Mahn, Wolfgang Scholz, Sophie Schramm, Jannik Schritt, Michael Stasik, Florian Weisser, Julia Willers, and Franzisca Zanker.
Nick Steele, Private Wildlife Conservancies and Saving Rhinos
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Private wildlife conservation is booming business in South Africa! Nick Steele stood at the cradle of this development in the politically turbulent 1970s and 1980s, by stimulating farmers in Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal) to pool resources in order to restore wilderness landscapes, but at the same time improve their security situation in cooperative conservancy structures. His involvement in Operation Rhino in the 1960s and subsequent networks to save the rhino from extinction, brought him into controversial military (oriented) networks around the Western world. The author’s unique access to his private diaries paints a personal picture of this controversial conservationist.
The Politics of Divided Space in the Cape and Transvaal
In Colonial Survey and Native Landscapes in Rural South Africa, 1850 - 1913, Lindsay Frederick Braun explores the technical processes and struggles surrounding the creation and maintenance of boundaries and spaces in South Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The precision of surveyors and other colonial technicians lent these enterprises an illusion of irreproachable objectivity and authority, even though the reality was far messier.

Using a wide range of archival and printed materials from survey departments, repositories, and libraries, the author presents two distinct episodes of struggle over lands and livelihoods, one from the Eastern Cape and one from the former northern Transvaal. These cases expose the contingencies, contests, and negotiations that fundamentally shaped these changing South African landscapes.
Environment, Ancestors and Development
The Malagasy possess a profound religious, socio-political and economic attachment to land which connects individuals and kinship groups with the ancestors. International stakeholders value Madagascar for its biodiversity, minerals and agricultural potential, while the Malagasy state views land as the necessary platform for its economic development. This collection presents original research by established and rising scholars across a broad spectrum of disciplines, including Human Genetics, Anthropology and History. Authors focus on land as the pivotal factor underlying the economic, social and religious structures of Malagasy society and its relationship with outsiders, aiming to provide new insights into the issues underlying Madagascar’s ongoing economic and political malaise.