Paper/Proposal Title
Examining Postcolonial Structures of Corporate Power through the Lens of Development Induced Projects in Africa
Location
M2225
Start Date
11-2-2023 1:45 PM
End Date
11-2-2023 3:15 PM
Keywords
colonialism and law, development, heritage, post-colonial Africa.
Abstract
This paper examines the relationships between socio-economic inequalities of power, race, wealth engendered by corporate structure, and domination in post-colonial Africa. In Africa, the drive towards infrastructural development and economic growth has increasingly led to the displacement of local populations by TNCs. This intractable challenge confines the experiences of Indigenous people, their decolonial imaginations, to an unwarranted historicizing parochialism. However, corporate power and structure - the weapons that enforce it, the knowledge institutions that legitimize it, the financial institutions that operationalize it - continues to sever indigenous peoples from their properties, including land, water, rivers and natural resources. The colonial practice of displacing locals from their ancestral land, which recasts black indigenous people as black bodies for biopolitical disposal, continues post-colonial in a nuanced being recreated in form of development induced displacement. This paper proceeds on the basis that conversion of land into property for corporate domination in the pretext of development induced displacement, and of people into targets of subjection, continue to mutate. Projects such as dams, urban highways, extraction of resources and urban renewal were initiated in several countries as monuments of economic hope. In some cases, these projects were greatly eulogised. Over the years, issues of inadequate compensation, improper resettlement, cosmetic consultations and coercion, have significantly precipitated counter-hegemonic resistance to development projects. At the core of this resistance is the fact that displaced minorities are necessary sacrifices for development - a feature of colonial heritage.
Author/Speaker Biographical Statement(s)
Prof. Oyeniyi Abe: Professor in Business and Human Rights at the University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, United Kingdom. Janet Gbam: Final year Doctoral Candidate at the Centre for Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria, South Africa.
Examining Postcolonial Structures of Corporate Power through the Lens of Development Induced Projects in Africa
M2225
This paper examines the relationships between socio-economic inequalities of power, race, wealth engendered by corporate structure, and domination in post-colonial Africa. In Africa, the drive towards infrastructural development and economic growth has increasingly led to the displacement of local populations by TNCs. This intractable challenge confines the experiences of Indigenous people, their decolonial imaginations, to an unwarranted historicizing parochialism. However, corporate power and structure - the weapons that enforce it, the knowledge institutions that legitimize it, the financial institutions that operationalize it - continues to sever indigenous peoples from their properties, including land, water, rivers and natural resources. The colonial practice of displacing locals from their ancestral land, which recasts black indigenous people as black bodies for biopolitical disposal, continues post-colonial in a nuanced being recreated in form of development induced displacement. This paper proceeds on the basis that conversion of land into property for corporate domination in the pretext of development induced displacement, and of people into targets of subjection, continue to mutate. Projects such as dams, urban highways, extraction of resources and urban renewal were initiated in several countries as monuments of economic hope. In some cases, these projects were greatly eulogised. Over the years, issues of inadequate compensation, improper resettlement, cosmetic consultations and coercion, have significantly precipitated counter-hegemonic resistance to development projects. At the core of this resistance is the fact that displaced minorities are necessary sacrifices for development - a feature of colonial heritage.
