Indigeneity and Pan-Africanism in World Politics: Challenging the Coloniality of Ecological Crises and the New Scramble for Africa

This project is concerned with the entangled processes of rapidly escalating global ecological crises and the 21st Century Scramble for Africa. While the responses by dominant international organizations and networks have failed to generate sustainable and effective solutions to address the multiple facets of planetary ecological crises and continue to operate within a neoliberal, modern/colonial and anthropocentric framework, the exploitation and enclosure of African natures, ecologies and ecosystems continues unhindered. As multiple historically and structurally intertwined "deep structures" are at the bottom of these alarming processes, one emerging question is how these critiques can be translated into a radical project that continues the decolonization of African peoples and lands based on sustainable modes of living and healthy relationships between the human and the more-than-human.

In this context, Felix takes a closer look at the radical possibilities between African indigeneity and Pan-Africanism as guiding frameworks and employs an interdisciplinary approach that includes decolonial theory, indigenous scholarship, political ecology, feminist theories, critical political economy and global studies theories. This project involves the participation of Ogoni communities from the Niger Delta and Maasai communities from East Africa and uses interviews, life histories and other qualitative research methods. This part of Felix's research seeks to identify alternative modes of being and living based on non-Western epistemologies and indigenous world-views that disrupt colonial imaginaries of "Nature," space and territory while simultaneously moving towards Pan-African unity.