To combat climate change and hunger, a number of governments, foundations and aid agencies have called for a ‘New Green Revolution’. Such calls obfuscate the dynamics of the Green Revolution. Using Arrighi's analysis of capital accumulation cycles, it is possible to trace a Long Green Revolution that spans the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Such an analysis illuminates commonalities in past and present Green Revolutions, including their bases in class struggles and crises of accumulation, modes of governance – particularly in the links between governments and philanthropic institutions – and the institutions through which truths about agricultural change were produced and became known. Such an analysis also suggests processes of continuity between the original Green Revolution and features of twenty-first-century agricultural change, while providing a historical grounding in international financial capital's structural changes to help explain some of the novel features that accompany the New Green ...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03066150.2012.719224

The Long Green Revolution

/pdf/world-development-report-2011-1mgvtayhnh.pdf

World development report 2011

In 2012, the political landscape in the Republic of Mali transformed rapidly, drastically, and unpredictably The formation of a new Tuareg political movement—the National Movement of Azawad—in October 2010 and the return to Mali of Tuareg with military experience from the Libyan conflict in August 2011—bringing along heavy weapons and logistical supplies— made speculation on renewed violence on the part of separatist Tuareg inevitable Indeed, Tuareg separatists launched attacks on Malian garrisons in the Sahara in January 2012 Mali had experienced such rebellions before What nobody foresaw was that this renewed conflict would lead to a coup d'etat by disgruntled junior officers; the near total collapse of Mali’s army and most of its democratic institutions; the seizure of all of northern Mali by Tuareg rebels and foreign and local mujahideen;1 the precocious proclamation of an independent Azawad Republic; and the effective occupation of the north of the country by an alliance of Jihadi-Salafi movements who imposed their form of shari'a law on a suffering and largely recalcitrant population Those events happened very quickly, and their effects will be felt for years This article attempts to give an overview of the crisis in Mali as it unfolded through 2012, with particular attention to what was happening on the ground in Mali itself

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One hippopotamus and eight blind analysts: a multivocal analysis of the 2012 political crisis in the divided Republic of Mali: extended editors cut

1. Founding saints and moneylenders: regional ecologies and oasis settlement 2. Saints on trucks: Algerian traders and settlement in the biblad al-sudan 3. Dates, cocaine, and AK 47s: moral conundrums on the Algero-Malian border 4. Struggles over encompassment: hierarchy, genealogies, and their contemporary use 5. Universal law and local containment: assemblies, qudah and the quest for civilisation 6. Settlement, mobility, and the daily pitfalls of Saharan cosmopolitanism Conclusion: Saharan connectivity and the 'swamp of terror' Glossary References Index.

/pdf/smugglers-and-saints-of-the-sahara-regional-connectivity-in-1j0pb1me01.pdf

Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara: Regional Connectivity in the Twentieth Century

Las venas abiertas de América Latina

The article analyses the causes and implications of the ongoing Tuareg rebellions in Niger and Mali. While the larger and more widespread rebellion in Niger is generally attributed to the Niger Tuareg's demands for a greater and more equitable share of the country's uranium revenues, the article reveals that both rebellions, while centering on grievances associated with marginalisation, indigenous land rights and the exploitation of mineral resources, are far more complex. Other key elements are the continuing impact on the region of the global war on terror; competing imperialisms and sub‐imperialisms; the associated interests of multinational mining companies; environmental threats and the interests of international drug‐traffickers. The article also details the human rights abuses inflicted on the civilian populations in both Niger and Mali by the recently US‐trained militaries.

Uranium Goes Critical in Niger: Tuareg RebellionsThreaten Sahelian Conflagration

While portrayed by the US as the rationalisation of its post-Cold War global military command structure, AFRICOM is revealed as the culmination of a ten-year thought process within the US Department of Defense, during which time Africa's strategic importance to the US has undergone several reappraisals as a result of the US's increasing need to secure African resources, notably oil; its global war on terror (GWOT) and China's growing investment on the continent. In the wake of 9/11, the US militarisation of Africa was justified in terms of its GWOT. However, this has become increasingly difficult as Africa, apart from the Maghreb and incidents in East Africa, has been relatively free of terrorism. Consequently, many of the ‘terrorist’ incidents in Africa, notably those in the western half of the Sahara-Sahel, were either grossly exaggerated or fabricated. Far from bringing development and security to this part of Africa, as AFRICOM claims, the US's militarisation of this region over the last 5-6 years (through its Pan-Sahel Initiative, Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative and now AFRICOM) brought increased insecurity, repression, economic and social disruption, political destabilisation and ultimately armed rebellions to a hitherto relatively tranquil region. Since 2005-6, the US has shifted its justification for the militarisation of the continent from the GWOT and counter-terrorism to the more humanitarian security-development discourse. This apparent paradigmatic shift, which presents AFRICOM as more benign than it really is, is part of the Bush administration's ‘information war’ and designed to mask the true purpose of Africom. The article explains the false premises on which the security-development discourse is constructed, its serious consequences for the people of Africa and the implications that both this discourse and the way it is being used by AFRICOM have for anthropologists.

US militarization in Africa: What anthropologists should know about AFRICOM

One of the biggest issues facing global development is that oil exports have contributed so little to the welfare of developing countries. The 'paradox of plenty', or the 'resource curse' as it is generally known, is that countries rich in natural resources, especially oil, tend to suffer from lower living standards, slower growth rates and higher incidence of conflict than their resource-poor counterparts. Between 1970-1993, for example, resource-poor countries, without petroleum, grew four times more rapidly than resource-rich countries, with petroleum, despite the fact that they had half the savings.' The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) have both confirmed that the greater a country's dependence on oil and mineral resources, the worse its growth performance.2

Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline: World Bank & ExxonMobil in 'Last Chance Saloon'

The article analyses the North African security situation over the last 15 or so years, but especially since the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, which provided the pre-emptive basis for the launch of Washington's global ‘War on Terror’. The article explains how and why the US, in collaboration with its lead ally in the region, Algeria, and with the cognisance of France and other European powers, duplicitously fabricated a new front in the ‘war on terror’ across the Sahara and Sahel, bringing an entirely new dimension to the nature and meaning of ‘terrorism’ in North Africa. Far from furthering political stability, security and democracy, as the Bush administration has proclaimed, Washington's attempt to establish itself as the elite power in the region has taken North Africa and most of the Sahel into a dangerous spiral of increased authoritarianism and repression, increased regional instability and insecurity, increased popular resentment of both Washington and the regimes of the region and the ...

Security & insecurity in North Africa

In this article, Jeremy Keenan analyses the recent spate of ‘westerners’ taken hostage in the Sahara, reportedly by Al-Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). The article, drawing on Keenan's earlier analyses of some three dozen hostage-takings in the region since the launch of the US ‘War on terror’ in the region in 2003, raises questions about the extent to which AQIM is associated with the Algerian and other regional intelligence services; the extent to which western intelligence services have been compromised by their wider geo-political and commercial interests and their attempts to manipulate AQIM; and the ethical dilemmas facing anthropologists working in such regions as to how they should position themselves in the interface between anthropology and intelligence.

Jeremy Keenan

Papers

Uranium Goes Critical in Niger: Tuareg RebellionsThreaten Sahelian Conflagration

US militarization in Africa: What anthropologists should know about AFRICOM

Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline: World Bank & ExxonMobil in 'Last Chance Saloon'

Security & insecurity in North Africa

Al‐Qaeda terrorism in the Sahara? Edwin Dyer's murder and the role of intelligence agencies