Climate Policy and Social Death: How Euro-American Green New Deals Reinforce the Disposability of African Life in the “Post”-Colonial

“[…] The Congo is the heart of Africa, any wound inflicted is a wound to the whole of Africa.” – Kwame Nkrumah addressing the African Union (1974)

On the 8^th of November 2023, an unprecedented scene unfolded on Twitter (now X), as a horrifying video of a young Congolese man located in Kinshasa, who had self-immolated, circulated around social media (Mtembu, 2023). As he screamed in agony and burned, so did the handwritten sign he held in his flaming hands. In its blazing, the words ‘Stop the Genocide in Congo’ lit up the African night sky but did not spark mass outrage in Western mainstream news (Mtembu, 2023). In fact, it did not even make breaking news. I cannot stop thinking about this man and his call to action to birth a radically new world order, who out of utter desperation for a life worthy of living, doused himself with gasoline and set himself ablaze. He combusted in order to garner and mobilise the attention necessary to liberate his people from the grinding shackles of persisting colonial-imperial rule, yet no one even knows his name.  This essay, however, is not about the politics of protest, and neither is simply about the ongoing colonial logics underpinning the unequal institutional arrangements of the supposed “post”-colonial space, which govern all aspects of life and death. It is a cultural critique of the ever-changing politics, languages and discourses of disposable life and mass social death in the evident philosophical and material contradictions of the so-called “post” colonial era. The prefix “post” here is in quotation marks to denote that I do not believe we have entered a fully functioning expression of post-coloniality that has operationalised the necessary features of a social, political, ideological, material, and spiritual reconstruction.

In ‘The Death of Postcolonialism’, Madiou (2021), writes of the problematic concept of “post” colonialism in its current co-opted iteration, and its failure to mobilise its true anti-colonial mission. He discusses how the concept of the “post” has become a term of silencing, great pacification, evident contradictions, and ideological avoidance, producing harmful assumptions about the world that directly contradict the unequal material realities and typologies of violence racialised bodies around the world are still politically and economically subjected to, via force. These harmful assumptions, epistemics, and political rhetoric produce a repressive and regressive civic ignorance that minimises or fails to continuously call into question the ways in which minds, bodies and states throughout the world are still entangled and embroiled in violent colonial modes of thought and imperial practices (Madiou 2021; St. Pierre, 1997; Giroux, 2024). Further, they blind us to the ongoing expressions of legacies of colonialism that shape contemporary vulnerabilities temporally and spatially across generations.

This particular story of self-mutilation, the Congolese man’s face and his untimely premature death, did not cause a single blip in the Western news cycle; it did not make it onto the cobalt-fuelled smartphones and lithium-ion powered laptops of the very consumers it should have, who are regularly shielded from the grotesque human costs and blood-soaked conflict minerals of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that fuel the modern day comforts emblematic of contemporary ‘civilised’ world (Gross, 2023; Shlein, 2024). Certainly, it was strategically ignored by the ethically challenged Western plutocrats, apathetic political elites, and their profit-driven morally bankrupt multinational companies, which continue to unconscionably expand various forms of neoliberal violence and sacrificial logics onto Black African bodies such as his (and my own). With half, if not more, of the world’s cobalt deposits sitting beneath Congo’s soils, rising production and market demands for the mineral on the global stage are triggering a new wave of harrowing humanitarian crises, rising insecurity, state corruption, severe human rights violations, and the expanding use child labour (Gross, 2023, Richie, 2023; Vivuya, 2024). Despite its vast and varying mineral endowments, the DRC experiences a severe poverty rate of over 70% in the midst of all its wealth, alluding to a deep hypocrisy around the value of human life and who we see as having inalienable rights to a dignified life (World Bank, 2024). Although the decades-long conflict in the Congo is complicated due to the various local, national and foreign actors embroiled in inflaming internal tempers and the hollowing out the country’s people and resources, the degree of longitudinal violence, slow sacrifice[1] and cyclical trauma stemming from the immense cruelties of Western corporate greed remains largely overlooked (Walsh, 2023; Vivuya, 2024; Lawal, 2024). 

If the flames seen in the city of Kinshasa that day in November are intended to be a mirror of the world we have constructed, what exactly is being reflected back to us about the depths of the normalised spiritual rot defining the operational mechanics of our world system and the societies we all inhabit? What does it say about us that, six months later, we still do not and cannot even speak of the nameless and faceless African apparition whose martyrdom was done in the hopes that some kind of overdue revolution would come in the aftermath of him ceasing to exist? Over the last thirty years of increasing volatility and unrelentingly meddlesome foreign powers, six million people have been killed and more than six million people have been displaced in what has been called Congo’s second silent holocaust (Lawal, 2024; ReliefWeb, 2024; Walsh, 2023). Congo’s first forgotten genocide, one that continuously fails to be remembered in the global memory space, took place under King Leopold II’s colonial rule between 1800 and 1920, where again colonial dispossession and exploitation of the Congo Free State resulted in the rarely acknowledged deaths of about 10 million Congolese people (an extermination project of nearly half of the population) (Korfiati, 2022).

Against the backdrop of the battle over the monopolies of violence, profit, and geopolitical domination, is the worsening existential threat that is Anthropogenic climate change. The human-induced climate crisis and the breakdown of planetary boundaries is simultaneously facilitating an increasingly hostile and predatory global economic competition that is seeking to exploit the rich natural resources of the Congo in order to execute a green transition (Vivuya, 2024; Lang et al., 2024). Green New Deals popping up across Europe and North America, which parrot poetics about ‘net-zero’, ‘green economy’ and ‘climate justice’, are conveniently silent about the level of structural violence, racial injustice and high social costs required to mobilise their decarbonisation policies (Vivuya, 2024; Lang et al., 2024). The key strategic minerals which are vital components of the green transition, such as the Congo’s copper, coltan, and cobalt, are not geared towards the salvation of humanity or recovering our social bonds as Western politicians love to postulate (Vivuya, 2024; Lang et al., 2024). Instead, the hyper-exploitation of these minerals is geared towards the preservation of global racial colonial modernity and the international world order, in addition to sustaining Euro-American geopolitical power, cultural hegemony and economic dominance. What is often left out of narratives around the climate policies of rich industrialised nations and their urgent need to innovate green technologies for decarbonisation is the unimaginable violence and social destruction they leave in their wake (Vivuya, 2024; Lang et al., 2024). What is silenced is the oppressive politics of the inhumane, underpinning their revered green projects that will supposedly save our blazing planet. 

In the public sphere, media communications circulate the notion of a green transition and Green New Deals without the critical context of what they even mean/imply, or what unequal impacts they produce across different communities in order to sustain the Global North’s carbon intensive modes of living. Instead, these climate action narratives and policy decisions, despite the structural violence and inequalities that contain, are presented as “rational,” “reasonable” and “safe” for all in international negotiations and processes of diplomacy in ways that aid and abet the climate crimes of Empire. Additionally, the circulation of these kinds of discourses that are decoupled from their contexts manufactures consent in the public sphere. What is suppressed from Western public consciousness is how these green “alternative pathways,” which are facilitated by ongoing neo-colonial relations in the contemporary capitalist world system, is that “the race towards the future” can only be fully operationalised through the continued large-scale exploitation and extraction of the Congolese territory. 

This is yet again putting Congolese people on the frontlines of a new profile of violence under the guise of “progressive” and “sustainable” climate mitigation and adaptation strategies “for all.” The growing demand for cobalt in technology is set to go up by approximately 60% in 2025 (Nogrady, 2020), where it will be used for various technological developments such as renewable energies and the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles (Vivuya, 2024; Lang et al., 2024). This is what is at the crux of the oxymoron that is green capitalism and its ideologies. It is here that we can see how the Green New Deals of many Western countries, including the United States, Canada, Belgium, and France, quietly in-build biopolitical mechanisms of triage in their climate action approaches (Lang et al., 2024). These approaches work to rationalise, legitimate, and justify longitudinal violence and colonial “necrotechnologies of control” on African bodies (Samudzi, 2019). This is an extension of a larger multifaceted conversation on climate colonialism: climate colonialism, in other words, is the Global North living and operating at the ecological expense of other countries in the Global South with lower carbon footprints (Hickel, 2020; Gonzales, 2021). It also includes how the Global North outsources the majority of the burden, violence and death of the climate crisis onto low- and middle-income countries in order to sustain their status quo and hyper-capitalist modes of living (Hickel, 2020; Gonzales, 2021). Therefore, the climate crisis with its discourses, proposed climate policies, and politics of the future all “sit at the heart of questions about humanness” (Meché, 2022).  

The making invisible of African suffering is neither new, arbitrary nor accidental. It is of strategic interest that the beneficiaries of Empire, racial colonial capitalism, and its blood money conveniently leave out the story of a man who, in a former European colony whose people and country are currently at the centre of renewed imperial scramble for Africa and a geopolitical power struggle, committed a radical act of self-immolation in protest (Searcey et al., 2021). A new battleground where lithium and cobalt are the coveted raw minerals synonymous with ideas of “progress,” “modernity,” “green capitalism,” “transhumanism,” and “techno-futurism” in the age of the Anthropocene (Searcey et al., 2021). The decoupling of the experiences of structural violence in African communities around the continent from the colonial past-present dynamics curates an ahistorical and abstracted understanding of how histories of violence have shaped the persistence of violence in the present. Further, it obscures how unaddressed pre-existing inequalities, legacies of white supremacy, unequal power relations and racial determinism/essentialism come to politically and economically designate racialised communities as disposable, surplus, excess, and ultimately what Judith Butler (2020) calls the ungrievable. 

The reason why the young Congolese man did not make mainstream news is because he was born a monstrous creature condemned to his own Blackness from the start, or as Fanon (2008) writes, part of “the Wretched of the Earth.” He was a man who had already died before he actually died in [Western] society’s eyes, and by that I mean he is a part of the invisible people living in ghost towns forced into the liminal space between death and [non]-existence; the walking dead, experiencing what sociologist Orlando Patterson in part explored as “social death” in 1985 in his seminal text Slavery and Social Death. In its genealogy, the notion of an “imprintable” and “disposable status” has travelled away from its original expression relating to social alienation in healthcare and the dehumanising process of chattel slavery (Králová, 2015). Within the neo-colonial frameworks of the international “rules-based” order, neoliberal global financial architecture, and Euro-American liberal democracy, the unequal social distribution and social organization of death has seeped into discourses of political economy and other examples of social ordering such as solitary confinement in prisons (Králová, 2015). Social death is a phenomenon which speaks to how unequal power relations, imperial logics, and systemic racism in the neoliberal capitalist world system produce a kind of enclosure or containment where “sub-sections of the population are treated differently” (Borgstrom, 2016). Social death, as Card puts it (2003), “is central to the evil of genocide,” as it is related to a uniform ignoring of suffering in order to justify the enactment of various forms of violence. Consequently, the peoples of the Congo, who are caught up in cycles of exploitation and greed, are denied the right to life and are treated as non-existent, even though they have not gone through the finality of physical/biological death (De Souza, 2020).

Social death is a condition stemming from the social pathologies of the neoliberal capitalist logic that refers to historically made-to-be vulnerable people as subhuman (De Souza, 2020), and regards them as “wasted lives” in the parasitic Euro-American modernisation project (Bauman, 2004, pg. 5). As such, social death as a state apparatus and socio-cultural condition ushers in and exposes racialised communities to a political language which not only reinforces global inequalities but “accelerates the death of the unwanted, powerless, and ‘ungrievable’” on a global scale (Giroux, 2024). Boaventura de Sousa Santo’s notion of the “abyssal line” (2007) and Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s (2017) “onto-Manichean line” are both helpful conceptual frameworks that highlight how the racial hierarchisation of humanity are colonial creations which establish delineations between those whose bodies are considered fully human and those deemed less than human, separating people according to ideas of “authentic humanity” (Maldonado-Torres, 2017). Therefore, the discursive construction of violence is politically, socially, economically, historically and geographically constructed. The language of violence and its typologies is also mediated through Western political “doublespeak,” cognitive dissonance and its language of non-responsibility and the severing of social bonds (Lutz, 1999). Originally coined by William Lutz, the concept of “doublespeak” is a powerful rhetorical tool/strategy that uses the language of obfuscation, conflation, deception, inflation and disinformation to distort reality and corrupt thought by manipulating how we come to understand social issues (Lutz, 1999). 

In this way, as a result of the politics of misinformation and institutional power, communities can be dangerously subjected to external geopolitical and economic forces from resource-extractive industries that politically and economically re-design a community’s adaptive capacities and disrupt parameters of habitability by introducing environmentally destructive/destabilising practices that increase ecological stressors. Centring the conversation around the Congo’s ongoing silent genocide in relation to its continued hyper-exploitation for “green capitalism” around the notion of social death allows for the interrogation of the relational economic and political structures, processes and global systems of exchange that continue to produce, normalise and legitimate Black suffering across space and time. As such, Western multilateral economic forces and their myopic, short-term profit motivations structurally introduce risks and manufacture vulnerability into the social realities of African communities by usurping community life supports (clean water access, food production, cultural and spiritual connections to the land, fishing livelihoods, etc.). This is one of the many different reasons why Vergés (2021) argues that “capital is coloniser,” because its guiding power and logic appropriates resources and cannibalises lands though the politics of disposability and social death in order to find new frontiers of colonial extraction (pg.15; pg.16). 

In their 2020 paper, Zografos & Robbins discuss the social costs of the international race for a green transition, where individual country Green New Deals and their bids for renewable power, under the current system, are placing increased pressures on already fragile countries such as the DRC. As a result of these extractive practices, the Congo is experiencing more environmental injustices, heightened human rights violations, and rising social inequities. In this way, the pathways towards participating in a low-carbon transition risks also participating in “the logic of sacrificing a certain space or ecology,” including populations in the ideological boundaries of the “global South” (de Souza, 2021), where historically exploited nations risk being converted into green sacrifice zones for the self-preservation of Western civilisation. Climate sacrifice zones ultimately articulate how [human] death is distributed geographically and socially through the increasingly hostile ecological conditions, intentional policy decisions, failed mitigation strategies, and climate financing gaps that cut off a community’s life supports. Consequently, communities are not only subjected to high likelihoods of physical death, but are exposed to de-personalising processes of social death as well. Consequently, accumulating African deaths are minimised, silenced, widely accepted, and, to some degree, even socially expected/curated in the “post” colonial, all while remaining epistemologically unquestioned by the colonial gaze and the Western imaginary.

Despite the presently ubiquitous nature of the climate crisis, where signs of ecological breakdown are finally touching all parts of the globe, including the ruling elites, the socioeconomic and psycho-social consequences are not distributed equally between states and communities. What is often missing from climate change discourses is the transmuting forms of colonial violence and the sacrificial logic it has taken, and how climate change itself has induced new patterns of violence in order to preserve the growth of Euro-American capital. The levels, scales, and forms of violence are so protracted, intense, and frequent in nature that it has brought us into a new and unique era of mass social sacrifice. Climate delay and inadequate climate mitigation and adaptation responses have manufactured consent for a kind of apocalyptic neoliberal violence that prioritises capital, disregards social ethics, dissolves social bonds, and has collapsed/fractured the ethical responsibilities which bind us together as a human society. From severe wealth inequalities and unpreceded levels of hunger, to ecocide and increasing civil wars over scarce resources (such as water), these interconnected forms of colonial violence exist along a continuum of harm and oppressive regimes that catalyse, normalise and sustain unfathomable group death in the 21st century (Giroux, 2024). It is here where collective communities are now subject to the disproportionate burden of mass death as a consequence of unmitigated emissions, environmental pollution and adaptation responses pathways subordinated to elite private sector interests. These mutating forms and iterations of racial-colonial violence shaped by the stronghold of Western ideological power in climate knowledge production, which inform response mechanisms such as the loss and damage funding model, highlight how persisting inequalities in international climate change negotiations, governance and policies prioritise Western economic interests while simultaneously offshoring burden onto racialised bodies – both within the Global South and within the Global North.

In the political economy of life and death, the incomplete project of postcolonial reparative action (Bhambra, 2019) necessitates the interrogation of how neoliberal logics, capitalist interests, historic erasure, and epistemic violence have come together to curate an exclusionary space built on strategic ignorance; one that works to discursively manufacture racialised vulnerabilities (de Souza, 2020). Social death is symptomatic of the unresolved antagonisms, paradoxes, hypocrisies, and contradictions in “post”-colonial. It highlights an unfinished postcolonial reparative project that is characterised by the barbaric expansion of structural violence and sacrificial zones, where race and citizenship become characteristics that co-exist with expandability and manufactured precarity. As a result, global sacrifice zones are facilitated along racialised lines, where acute vulnerability has been discursively manufactured and existential threat is superimposed onto those whose lives have been defined as unworthy of human values. As such, climate policies are shaped by and rooted in the logic of sacrifice and necropolitics in order to protect the carbon and high energy intensive lifestyles of the Global North, and are implicitly rooted in the systemic sacrifice of racialised territories, peoples and their futures.

The vocabulary of violence and sacrifice is politically, socially, economically, historically, and ecologically constructed. In the case of the African continent, the construction of entrenched and emerging systemic violence itself is filtered through historic distortions and misleading representations that [re]produce racialised archetypes and depictions of poor Africans, often portraying them as dependent, undeveloped, incapable and dysfunctional – attributes underpinning the social, cultural and political invention of a monolithic African and an undifferentiated Other (Mudimbe 1988; Fair, 1993). These framings and images of an “impoverished” African, “famine-plagued” Africans and a “violent” Africa are reinforced and cognitively normalised/rationalised by biased and lazy media coverages of the African continent (Fair, 1993). The normalisation of such images is in itself an act of political and social violence. Importantly, within the globalised world system, the circulation of such harmful racist imagery is often decoupled and delinked from social, political and historical contexts. In this way, this is what normalises and depoliticises the varying forms of colonial violence enacted onto African bodies. It also serves to normalise the idea that violence is innate to the Black body. In global public life, the decoupling of violence from the contexts producing it fails to bring into sharp focus the persisting unequal institutional arrangements, social formations, and power dynamics in the “post” that continue to subject certain peoples and geographies to constant structural violence, processes of domination, and apparatuses of subjugation that shape exposure to social death and slow death during crises such as climate change (O’Sullivan et al., 2022; Clinton-Ezekwe et al., 2022).   

“Post”-coloniality as a spatio-temporal rupturing has not led to the institutional and cultural rehabilitation, re-humanisation and recovery of the African body as a physical and metaphysical entity with fully materialised rights to [dignified] life. A true postcolonial reparative action and project would afford the African subject a personhood status that not only restores spiritual-social bonds, but bonds that must be protected voraciously. Instead, what is discursively constructed of Africa and its inhabitants through the myopic panoptic colonial gaze is a dangerously pervasive mythology of “lands occupied with people who are considered to be living worthless kinds of lives” (Meché, 2022). This is larger part of a trend throughout the African continent where the West’s quest and thirst for fossil-fuelled modernity and its hyper-consumerist lifestyles is “violently marked by black people [and black death], while also laying claims to territories, histories, languages, cultures and the Earth” (Ndaba & Nyirongo 2024). Therefore, these collections of bodies and lands that sit in the veil between life and death are constantly at high risk of being politically alienated and erased by wider society (de Souza, 2020; Mulkay & Ernst, 1991).

In its current historic inflection, the postcolonial space is littered with obvious contradictions, antagonisms and hypocrisies which have brought us as entangled, interdependent and interconnected societies into an undeniable state of poly-crisis. A crisis is a cumulative sum of various entrenched political, economic, social, and historic issues coming together to form a critical tipping point within society. Mills (2000) argues that “issues” are public matters that transcend the local individual polity and take on a [global] public life as they are influenced by the overarching organisational and governing institutions that “overlap and interpenetrate to form the larger structure of social and historic life” globally (pg.8). Therefore, issues and their varying manifestations indicate a “crisis in institutional arrangements,” whereby these arrangements work to economically and politically legitimise or de-legitimise the structural violence(s) that produce and reproduce issues of great inequality. These forms of intersecting violence and inequality are by-products of the oppressive, colonial institutional apparatuses and imperial economic structures that characterise the repressive world-making ideologies, regimes, and languages of Western nation States within the “postcolonial” condition. The climate crisis, while being the central guiding theme of this research, is but one symptom of grotesque societal pathologies; it offers a window where we can be present witnesses to how the logics of neoliberal capitalism and monopolised markets have structured civilisation via the politics of the inhumane and the politics of disposability by way of class, race and citizenship. 

For the Western sociological imaginary, the prefix “post,” with its established temporal and spatial boundaries, is a space take for granted, of fully materialised social realties with afforded freedoms and rights for all. As such, there is a “strategic inability” in the Western imaginative context to reckon with and reconcile histories and legacies of imperialism and colonialism. In addition to how those historic colonial continuities maintain inequalities and create vulnerabilities that manifest along racialised lines. These colonial wounds and inequalities are what result in the rationalisation of longitudinal violence, of inequitable burden placement, systemic neglect, and the outsourcing of premature death and preventable deaths in Africa in the “post” colonial. It is also what leads to the construction and expansion of sacrifice zones on the continent. Climate sacrifice zones are areas of political abandonment, corporate negligence, and social alienation, and their existence brings to the surface the old colonial wounds that continue to haunt the paradoxical postcolonial. In the political economy of life and death, the incomplete project of postcolonial reparative action (Bhambra, 2019) necessitates the interrogation of how neoliberal logics, capitalist interests, historic erasure, and epistemic violence have come together to curate an exclusionary space built on strategic ignorance; one that works to discursively manufacture racialised vulnerabilities (de Souza, 2020). 

The hegemonic Eurocentric language and rhetorical frames accompanying ideas of the prefix “post” take place against the backdrop of a series of unrelenting social movements and historic struggles for liberation, critiquing and rejecting political, social, economic and spiritual conditions and systems organised around making all life exploitable (human and non-human alike). The ongoing intersecting harms and threat multipliers they are forced to face are catalysed by systemic racism and anti-black rhetoric embedded in our social fabrics, which serve to dehumanise, use, and discard without the dignity of even being mourned (Butler, 2009; Mbebe, 2011; Sanaullah, 2022).

According to eyewitnesses in the crowd encircling the young Congolese man, he kept shouting Congo na nga!, Congo na nga! (my Congo!, my Congo!) as the flames engulfed him (Mtembu, 2023). In many African societies, the act of naming a child is alchemy, it is an incantation that plays a significant sociological role in virtually all aspects of human living: it is ultimately to be seen, recognised, and valued in your personhood, and is the thumbprint saying that a person was uniquely present in this world (Olatunji et al., 2015). Names are part of how we remember one another and how we form social bonds that keep us safely tethered to one another. The power of a name is in its recitation and that invocation’s abilities to directly connect us to our calling, our familial legacies, our cultures, our social virtues and at times our geopolitical histories (Olatunji et al., 2015). To be left unknown and untitled and with a grave unmarked in global public life, especially in the face of a silent holocaust, is to be effectively erased and robbed clean of your humanness. On the 10th of December 2011, a 25-year-old forcibly displaced fatherless father named Cedrick Nianza in Congo’s city of Boma poured gas onto his body and set himself alight, making him the first ever martyr for the Democratic Republic of Congo’s revolution (SaharaReporters, 2012). Cedrick, meaning “loved and kindly”, echoes the profound discontent, despair and enduring unrelenting misery of the millions of Congolese desperate to finally be seen in their full humanness. The ashes they both leave behind are an expression of a civic duty aimed at reclaiming the Congo for the people and their sacrifice is symbolic of a deep desire to make sacred again what has, for so long, been mired by destruction. #FreeCongo

[1]  As Juskus (2023) discusses, slow sacrifice is: “a process in which the securing of one’s own life and satisfying one’s own desires produces death and harms that are disproportionately borne by other people and places.”

Bibliography

Butler, J. (2020). The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind. Verso.

Borgstrom, E., (2017),  Social Death, QJM: An International Journal of Medicine, Volume 110, Issue 1, Pages 5–7, https://doi.org/10.1093/qjmed/hcw183

Bhambra, G. K., & Newell, P. (2022). More than a metaphor: ‘climate colonialism’ in perspective. Global Social Challenges Journal (published online ahead of print 2022). Retrieved Dec 5, 2023, from https://doi.org/10.1332/EIEM6688

de Souza L. M., ‘Sacrifice zone’: The environment–territory–place of disposable lives, Community Development Journal, Volume 56, Issue 2, April 2021, Pages 220–243, https://doi.org/10.1093/cdj/bsaa042

de Sousa Santos, B. (2007). Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges. Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 30(1), 45–89. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40241677

Card, C. (2003). Genocide and social death. Genocide and Human Rights, 18(1), 63–79. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554832_19 

Fair, J. E. (1993). War, Famine, and Poverty: Race in the Construction of Africa’s Media Image. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 17(2), 5-22. https://doi.org/10.1177/019685999301700202

Giroux, H. (2023, April 11). Fascist politics in the age of neoliberal capitalism: confronting the domestication of the unimaginable. COUNTERPUNCH. Retrieved from https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/04/11/fascist-politics-in-the-age-of-neoliberal-capitalismconfronting-the-domestication-of-the-unimaginable/. 

Giroux, H. (2024, March 13). Everyday fascism: brecht’s warning about the serpent’s egg. COUNTERPUNCH. Retrieved from https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/13/everyday-fascism-brechts-warning-about-the-serpents-egg/. 

Gonzalez, C. G. (2021). The sacrifice Zones of Carbon Capitalism: Race, expendability, and Loss and Damage. Research Handbook on Climate Change Law and Loss & Damage, 43–59. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788974028.00009

Hickel, J. (2020). Quantifying national responsibility for climate breakdown: An equality-based attribution approach for carbon dioxide emissions in excess of the planetary boundary. The Lancet Planetary Health, 4(9). https://doi.org/10.1016/s2542-5196(20)30196-0

Humanitarian crisis escalates in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo due to renewed clashes and flooding – democratic republic of the Congo. ReliefWeb. (2024, February 19). https://reliefweb.int/report/democratic-republic-congo/humanitarian-crisis-escalates-eastern-democratic-republic-congo-due-renewed-clashes-and-flooding 

Hopkins, H. (2020, June 8). Racism is killing the planet. Sierra Club. https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/racism-killing-planet 

Ijeoma Catherine, C.-E., Charles, O. I., Ifeanyichukwu Clinton, E., & Olalekan, R. M. (2022). Slow death from pollution: Potential health hazards from air quality in the MGBEDE oil fields of SouthSouth Nigeria. Open Access Journal of Science, 5(1), 61–69. https://doi.org/10.15406/oajs.2022.05.00177

Juskus, R. (2023). Sacrifice Zones. Environmental Humanities. 15. 3-24. 10.1215/22011919-10216129.

Korfiati, M. (2022, May 4). Congolese genocide: The overlooked history of the colonized Congo. TheCollector. https://www.thecollector.com/congolese-genocide-colonized-congo/

Králová, J. (2015). What is Social Death? Contemporary Social Science, 10(3), 235–248. https://doi.org/10.1080/21582041.2015.1114407

Lang, M., Manahan , M. A., & Bringel, B. (2024). Geopolitics of green colonialism global justice and Ecosocial Transitions. PLUTO PRESS. 

Lawal, S. (2024, February 21). A guide to the decades-long conflict in dr congo. Aljazeera. Retrieved from https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/21/a-guide-to-the-decades-long-conflict-in-dr-congo#:~:text=Some%20of%20Kinshasa’s%20neighbours%20are,internally%20displaced%20in%20eastern%20DRC.

Lutz, W. (1999). Doublespeak defined: Cut through the bull**** and get the point. HarperResource.

Madiou, M. S. E. M. S. E. (11AD). The Death of Postcolonialism: The Founder’s Foreword. Janus Unbound, 1(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.2021/ju.v1i1.2303 

Maldonado-Torres, N. (2017). On the Coloniality of Human Rights. Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, (114), 117–136. https://doi.org/10.4000/rccs.6793

Mbembe, A. (2017). The Subject of Race. In Critique of Black Reason (pp. 11–15). essay, Duke University Press.

McClintock, A. (1992). The angel of progress: Pitfalls of the term “post-colonialism.” Social Text, (31/32), 84–98. https://doi.org/10.2307/466219 

Meché, B. (2022). Black as drought. Environment and Society, 13(1), 60–77. https://doi.org/10.3167/ares.2022.130105

Mignolo, W. D. (2007). Introduction Coloniality of power and de-colonial thinking. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 155–167. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162498

Mills, C. W. (2000). The Sociological Imagination. Oxford University Press.

Mudimbe, V. Y. (1988). The invention of Africa : gnosis, philosophy, and the order of knowledge. Indiana University Press.

MULKAY, M., & ERNST, J. (1991). THE CHANGING PROFILE OF SOCIAL DEATH. European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie / Europäisches Archiv Für Soziologie, 32(1), 172–196. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23997549

Mtembu, X. (2023, November 18). IOL. Retrieved from https://www.iol.co.za/news/africa/congolese-man-sets-himself-on-fire-in-protest-of-genocide-d9145ef5-aef2-4798-aa93-d41e31df6fe9. 

Ncube, N. (2021). Human rights in the zones of non-being: Lessons on [not] speaking about and on behalf of “others” from J.M. Coetzee’s foe. Journal of Decolonising Disciplines, 3(1). https://doi.org/10.35293/jdd.v3i1.20

Nogrady, B. (2020, May 14). Cobalt is critical to the renewable energy transition. how can we minimize its social and environmental cost?. Ensia. https://ensia.com/features/cobalt-sustainability-batteries/ 

O’Sullivan, A., Omukuti, J., & Ryder, S. S. (2022). Global surpluses of extraction and slow climate violence: A sociological framework. Sociological Inquiry, 93(2), 320–340. https://doi.org/10.1111/soin.12518

Overview. World Bank. (2024). https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/drc/overview 

Olatunji, Abdulganiy, et al. (2015). “Personal name as a reality of everyday life: naming dynamics in select African societies.” Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 8, no. 3, Aug. 2015, pp. 72+. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A427556193/AONE?u=ocul_mcmaster&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=5ffcadca. Accessed 23 Apr. 2024.

Patterson, O. (1982). Slavery and Social Death. Harvard University Press.

Schlein, L. (2024, March 22). DR congo facing alarming levels of violence, hunger, poverty, disease. VOA. Retrieved from https://www.voanews.com/a/dr-congo-facing-alarming-levels-of-violence-hunger-poverty-disease-/7539028.html. 

Sambuzi, Z. (2022, February 22). Reparative Futurities: Thinking From the Ovaherero and Nama Colonial Genocide. THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE. https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/reparations/reparative-futurities-thinking-from-the-ovaherero-and-nama-colonial-genocide-by-zoe-samudzi

Sanaullah, N. (2022, May 3). The Climate Crisis is a (neo)colonial capitalist crisis: Experiences, responses and steps towards Decolonising Climate action. European Network Against Racism. https://www.enar-eu.org/the-climate-crisis-is-a-neocolonial-capitalist-crisis-experiences-responses-and-steps-towards-decolonising-climate-action/

Sahara Reporters. (2013, January 18).Young congolese sets himself on fire becoming a martyr of the Congolese revolution. (n.d.). Sahara Reporters. Retrieved from https://saharareporters.com/2012/01/18/young-congolese-sets-himself-fire-becoming-martyr-congolese-revolution.

Searcey, D., Forsythe , M., & Lipton, E. (2021, November 2). A power struggle over cobalt rattles the clean energy revolution. The New York Times.

Sultana, F. (2022). The unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality. Political Geography, 99, 102638. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2022.102638

St-Pierre, P. (1997). Multiple meanings and contexts: The diversity of the post‑colonial. TTR : Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction, 10(1), 9–17. https://doi.org/10.7202/037278ar 

Walsh, D. (2023, December 17). The overlooked crisis in congo: ‘we live in war.’ The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/17/world/africa/democratic-republic-of-congo-elections.html?login=email&auth=login-email.

Vergès, F. (2021). A Decolonial Feminism. Pluto Press. 

Vivuya, B. (2024, January 30). In the east of the drc, a war is financed by blood minerals. Prospect. Retrieved from https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/foreign-correspondence/64646/in-the-east-of-the-drc-a-war-is-financed-by-blood-minerals. 

Zografos, C., & Robbins, P. (2020a). Green sacrifice zones, or why a Green New Deal cannot ignore the cost shifts of just transitions. One Earth, 3(5), 543–546. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2020.10.012

Read more at Lulwama Mulalu.