Scarcity reimagined: global green imaginaries, frontier-making, and resource conflict in Africa
提出“全球绿色稀缺想象”“绿色前沿”和“绿色冲突”三个概念，分析气候与生物多样性危机叙事如何加速对非洲的干预、重塑土地权利与治理，并指出绿色项目可能复制传统资源开采中的排斥与冲突。
• Reframes resource conflict debates with the concepts: global green scarcity imaginaries, greening frontiers, and green conflicts. • Argues how climate and biodiversity crisis narratives justify accelerated interventions in Africa, reshaping land rights and governance. • Shows how green projects can reproduce the same exclusion and conflict that are associated with traditional extraction of e.g. oil. • Demonstrates that if equity and justice are sidelined, green initiatives risk generating tension and conflict, often as a slow violence. This article develops the three concepts global green scarcity imaginaries, greening frontiers, and green conflicts, to revisit the resource–conflict debate in Africa under contemporary climate and biodiversity crises. Earlier debates contrasted resource abundance with scarcity linked to environmental stress, weak governance, and social fragmentation, yet tended to treat scarcity as a material fact. We argue instead that scarcity is increasingly imagined and politicized. Global green scarcity imaginaries frame ecosystems, resources, and time as vanishing, legitimizing urgent interventions in the name of planetary survival. These imaginaries produce greening frontiers: future oriented spaces where conservation, renewable energy, and carbon sequestration reconfigure land rights and governance, often in regions long cast as marginal. Within these frontiers, competing claims and exclusions generate green conflicts: disputes that arise not despite but because of sustainability projects, often manifesting as slow violence. Drawing on cases from across Africa, this article and the special issue it introduces examine how narratives travel across scales to intersect with local struggles, reshaping conflict dynamics in drylands and beyond. By setting these new concepts against earlier framings, we show how climate and biodiversity crises transform scarcity into urgent planetary claims that risk reproducing inequality and conflict under the guise of green transition.