Iva Peša
Biographic Data
| ID | 155813 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Iva Peša |
| GIVEN NAMES | Iva |
| FAMILY NAME | Peša |
| SIGNATURE | PEŠA I |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Groningen |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6132-1332 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 70 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 28 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
On jerabos and kpo fire
Industrialized mining and oil drilling have engendered profound infrastructural and environmental violence throughout Africa in the twentieth century. Rapacious resource extraction has resulted in toxic wastelands, land dispossession, and jeopardized well-being. As ways of resisting extractive violence and longstanding environmental dispossession, some communities have made attempts to repossess and ‘legitimize’ the natural resources in their loc…
Environment, Materiality, and Firearms
The role of firearms in African history has been extensively studied, but rarely from an environmental history perspective. Three examples from twentieth-century Mwinilunga in north-west Zambia, related to hunting, guerrilla warfare, and witchcraft, argue for the importance of considering environmental factors and materiality in histories of firearms. A focus on environmental history better illustrates the appropriation, use, and power of firearm…
Gabrielle Hecht. Residual Governance
Participatory action research in neoliberal academia
Participatory action research (PAR) is described in the literature as a valuable method for enhancing the power of marginalized individuals and communities by collectively producing knowledge to transform the inequalities they experience. This deviates from most social science research, where such actors are largely the subjects of data extraction. This paper reports on our experience of using PAR to examine existing food systems and ideas regard…
Just food transitions
In this paper we apply the concept of just transition to food systems, a domain central to environmental sustainability and social justice. We broaden and democratise the just transition debate by foregrounding a new set of voices and experiences from civil society organisations and networks in Brazil, Sierra Leone, the United Kingdom, and Zambia. We analyse the understandings of just food system transition as voiced in participatory exchanges be…
Toxic coloniality and the legacies of resource extraction in Africa
This review essay examines the colonial roots of toxicity caused by resource extraction across Africa, thereby foregrounding the persistent necropolitics of oil spills and mining waste dumps. Zooming in on examples of mining and oil drilling localities, with a particular focus on Johannesburg, the Central African Copperbelt and the Niger Delta, it sheds light on what coloniality entails. This article traces the long-term temporalities of extracti…
Politicised Environments
This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0
Mind the gap
Transitions away from fossil fuels need to be governed, financed, regulated and coordinated, patterns of production and innovation need to be steered and shaped by rulemaking bodies at all levels of authority. For this to happen across a highly uneven international system, global institutions have a vital role to play in supporting and implementing just transitions (JTs) that align with principles addressing the procedural, distributional, interg…
De klimaatcrisis als koloniale crisis
The climate crisis as a colonial crisis. Perspectives from African environmental history By reviewing recent works in African environmental history, this article explores the colonial roots of the Anthropocene. I argue that a historical approach is crucial to understand the current climate crisis and its planetary inequalities. This article traces colonial environmental injustices, through examples such as forestry, agriculture and hydroelectric …
Anthropocene Narratives of Living with Resource Extraction in Africa
African experiences have so far not been central to Anthropocene debates. While the Anthropocene usefully theorizes the planetary dimensions of environmental change, how do its propositions hold when applied to specific and widely divergent settings? Drawing from three examples-copper mining in Zambia, gold mining in South Africa, and oil drilling in Nigeria-this article examines varied experiences of environmental change in the Anthropocene. Res…
Oorlog, milieu en samenleving
Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community
Table ronde
Cette table ronde s’est tenue le 16 mars 2022 à la Maison de la recherche de l’Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès. Elle a été organisée par Antoine Acker (IHEID Genève) et Sébastien Rozeaux (Framespa), avec le soutien de l’IPEAT, de la Chaire Amérique latine, de l’Atelier d’écologie politique de Toulouse (Atecopol), de l’IHEID et du Fonds national suisse. Y ont participé Charles-François Mathis (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), José Augusto Pá…
Decarbonization, Democracy and Climate Justice
The Copperbelt of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo
The Central African Copperbelt, a region which straddles the boundary between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia, holds exceptionally rich and high-grade copper deposits. These deposits have been worked from as early as the 6th century ce . Still, the commencement of large-scale industrial resource extraction at the start of the 20th century, spurred by imperial rivalry between Belgian and British interests, initiated fundamental process…
Histories of Empire and Environmental Legacies in Africa
Societal debates about climate change have rekindled interest in environmental history approaches. This review article considers three recent books in African environmental history, on the Kruger National Park, the East African Groundnut Scheme, and on infrastructure in postcolonial Dar es Salaam. Why is it important to study the empire–environment nexus? How do African experiences relate to discussions on the Anthropocene? Taking environmental d…
A Planetary Anthropocene? Views From Africa
The Anthropocene is built on complex technological systems that span the globe. Historians of science have done much to document the emergence of this “technosphere.” Yet more interdisciplinary and regionally diverse approaches are needed to understand the complexity and unpredictability of the technosphere in our Anthropocene times. Rather than assuming a single planetary phenomenon, this essay emphasizes the widely varied lived experiences of t…
Beyond Paternalism
Micro-Studies of Urban Lifedecline on the Zambian Copperbelt since 1980, James Ferguson speaks of previous 'expectations of modernity' induced by copper mining, while Patience Mususa's ethnography 'There Used to Be Order' juxtaposes ZCCM policies with a neoliberal 'fending for oneself ' after privatisation. 4 On the Congolese Copperbelt, similarly, Donatien Dibwe dia Mwembu examines the trajectories of 'Bana Shaba' (children of copper) who have b…
Across the Copperbelt
The Central African Copperbelt, encompassing the mining communities of Katanga (DR Congo) and Zambia, has been central to the study of modernisation and rapid social and political change in urban Africa. This volume expands upon earlier studies of industrial mining, male-dominated formal labour organisation and political change by examining both sides of the border from pre-colonial history to the present and encompassing a wide range of economic…
Extractive industries and the environment
Resource extraction has historically caused dramatic environmental changes across the globe. Although mining and oil drilling have transformed landscapes and polluted the air and water wherever they have taken place, knowledge of how these environmental transformations have been experienced and lived in different parts of the world remains fragmentary. This special issue seeks to provide new insights into the environmental histories of resource e…
Between waste and profit
Industrial mining activity has transformed the environment of the Central African Copperbelt in the twentieth century. Copper extraction and processing altered the urban landscape, generated much waste, and caused severe long-term pollution. This article examines changing environmental values among diverse Copperbelt actors, including mine engineers, government officials, mineworkers, doctors, and farmers. Why were air and water pollution long ac…
Mining, Waste and Environmental Thought on the Central African Copperbelt, 1950-2000
Since the early twentieth century, the copper-mining industry on the Zambian and Congolese Copperbelt has moved millions of tonnes of earth and dramatically reshaped the landscape. Nonetheless, mining companies, governments and even residents largely overlooked the adverse environmental aspects of mining until the early 1990s. By scrutinising environmental knowledge production on the Central African Copperbelt from the 1950s until the late 1990s,…
Crops and Copper
Agricultural production has historically been integral to the central African Copperbelt’s urban growth. None the less, urban agriculture has rarely received attention in the otherwise rich Copperbelt historiography. Government and mine officials, as well as social scientists, have persistently framed urban agriculture as an informal, subsistence and feminised activity. Growing maize or vegetables has, in such views, been interpreted as a sign of…
Corey Ross, Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire
The Developmental Potential of Frugal Innovation among Mobile Money Agents in Kitwe, Zambia
Frugal Innovation and Development
Frugal Innovation and Development
Crops and Copper
Agricultural production has historically been integral to the central African Copperbelt’s urban growth. None the less, urban agriculture has rarely received attention in the otherwise rich Copperbelt historiography. Government and mine officials, as well as social scientists, have persistently framed urban agriculture as an informal, subsistence and feminised activity. Growing maize or vegetables has, in such views, been interpreted as a sign of…
Mining, Waste and Environmental Thought on the Central African Copperbelt, 1950-2000
Since the early twentieth century, the copper-mining industry on the Zambian and Congolese Copperbelt has moved millions of tonnes of earth and dramatically reshaped the landscape. Nonetheless, mining companies, governments and even residents largely overlooked the adverse environmental aspects of mining until the early 1990s. By scrutinising environmental knowledge production on the Central African Copperbelt from the 1950s until the late 1990s,…
A Planetary Anthropocene? Views From Africa
The Anthropocene is built on complex technological systems that span the globe. Historians of science have done much to document the emergence of this “technosphere.” Yet more interdisciplinary and regionally diverse approaches are needed to understand the complexity and unpredictability of the technosphere in our Anthropocene times. Rather than assuming a single planetary phenomenon, this essay emphasizes the widely varied lived experiences of t…
Transforming Innovations in Africa
Africa abounds with examples of material and immaterial innovations that were envisaged, developed and designed elsewhere yet came to be innovatively and sometimes unexpectedly transformed in Africa. The authors in this volume explore how external innovations (products, technologies, services, institutions and processes) have been appropriated in African societies in order to be acceptable and relevant to local conditions, expectations and demand…
Participatory action research in neoliberal academia
Participatory action research (PAR) is described in the literature as a valuable method for enhancing the power of marginalized individuals and communities by collectively producing knowledge to transform the inequalities they experience. This deviates from most social science research, where such actors are largely the subjects of data extraction. This paper reports on our experience of using PAR to examine existing food systems and ideas regard…
Extractive industries and the environment
Resource extraction has historically caused dramatic environmental changes across the globe. Although mining and oil drilling have transformed landscapes and polluted the air and water wherever they have taken place, knowledge of how these environmental transformations have been experienced and lived in different parts of the world remains fragmentary. This special issue seeks to provide new insights into the environmental histories of resource e…
The Objects of Life in Central Africa
In The Objects of Life in Central Africa the history of consumption and social change from 1840 until 1980 is explored. By taking consumption as a vantage point, the contributions deviate from and add to previous works which have mainly analysed issues of production from an economic and political perspective. The chapters are broad-ranging in temporal and geographical focus, including contributions on Congo, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Angola. Topics ra…
Anthropocene Narratives of Living with Resource Extraction in Africa
African experiences have so far not been central to Anthropocene debates. While the Anthropocene usefully theorizes the planetary dimensions of environmental change, how do its propositions hold when applied to specific and widely divergent settings? Drawing from three examples-copper mining in Zambia, gold mining in South Africa, and oil drilling in Nigeria-this article examines varied experiences of environmental change in the Anthropocene. Res…
The Developmental Potential of Frugal Innovation among Mobile Money Agents in Kitwe, Zambia
Just food transitions
In this paper we apply the concept of just transition to food systems, a domain central to environmental sustainability and social justice. We broaden and democratise the just transition debate by foregrounding a new set of voices and experiences from civil society organisations and networks in Brazil, Sierra Leone, the United Kingdom, and Zambia. We analyse the understandings of just food system transition as voiced in participatory exchanges be…
Decarbonization, Democracy and Climate Justice
Between waste and profit
Industrial mining activity has transformed the environment of the Central African Copperbelt in the twentieth century. Copper extraction and processing altered the urban landscape, generated much waste, and caused severe long-term pollution. This article examines changing environmental values among diverse Copperbelt actors, including mine engineers, government officials, mineworkers, doctors, and farmers. Why were air and water pollution long ac…
We Have Killed This Animal Together, May I Also Have a Share?'1Local-National Political Dynamics in Mwinilunga District, Zambia, 1950s-1970s
Zambian political history has been viewed predominantly through the prism of the national, by focusing on high politics, official ideology and Big Men. The local level equally has to be taken into consideration, as local forces and interests have shaped the translation of national politics in the everyday lives of voters. Moreover, considering the local context can facilitate an understanding of national politics itself. Through the case of Mwini…
Transforming Innovations in Africa
Africa abounds with examples of material and immaterial innovations that were envisaged, developed and designed elsewhere yet came to be innovatively and sometimes unexpectedly transformed in Africa. The authors in this volume explore how external innovations (products, technologies, services, institutions and processes) have been appropriated in African societies in order to be acceptable and relevant to local conditions, expectations and demand…
Introduction
In the last years before the independence of Zambia and Malawi, the researchers of the renowned Rhodes-Livingstone Institute were contemplating writing a book to be entitled 'The Industrial Revolution in Central Africa'. There are substantial methodological problems in the historical study of African consumption. The study of material culture has tended to be one which exoticises its subject, which is concerned to actively ignore the changes to w…
The Objects of Life in Central Africa
In The Objects of Life in Central Africa the history of consumption and social change from 1840 until 1980 is explored. By taking consumption as a vantage point, the contributions deviate from and add to previous works which have mainly analysed issues of production from an economic and political perspective. The chapters are broad-ranging in temporal and geographical focus, including contributions on Congo, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Angola. Topics ra…
Lessons from African History. Between the Deep and the Shallow Ends of Social Theory and Historical Empiricism. An Interview with Frederick Cooper
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We Have Killed This Animal Together, May I Also Have a Share?'1Local-National Political Dynamics in Mwinilunga District, Zambia, 1950s-1970s
Zambian political history has been viewed predominantly through the prism of the national, by focusing on high politics, official ideology and Big Men. The local level equally has to be taken into consideration, as local forces and interests have shaped the translation of national politics in the everyday lives of voters. Moreover, considering the local context can facilitate an understanding of national politics itself. Through the case of Mwini…
Frugal Innovation and Development
The Developmental Potential of Frugal Innovation among Mobile Money Agents in Kitwe, Zambia
Corey Ross, Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire
Between waste and profit
Industrial mining activity has transformed the environment of the Central African Copperbelt in the twentieth century. Copper extraction and processing altered the urban landscape, generated much waste, and caused severe long-term pollution. This article examines changing environmental values among diverse Copperbelt actors, including mine engineers, government officials, mineworkers, doctors, and farmers. Why were air and water pollution long ac…
Mining, Waste and Environmental Thought on the Central African Copperbelt, 1950-2000
Since the early twentieth century, the copper-mining industry on the Zambian and Congolese Copperbelt has moved millions of tonnes of earth and dramatically reshaped the landscape. Nonetheless, mining companies, governments and even residents largely overlooked the adverse environmental aspects of mining until the early 1990s. By scrutinising environmental knowledge production on the Central African Copperbelt from the 1950s until the late 1990s,…
Crops and Copper
Agricultural production has historically been integral to the central African Copperbelt’s urban growth. None the less, urban agriculture has rarely received attention in the otherwise rich Copperbelt historiography. Government and mine officials, as well as social scientists, have persistently framed urban agriculture as an informal, subsistence and feminised activity. Growing maize or vegetables has, in such views, been interpreted as a sign of…
Beyond Paternalism
Micro-Studies of Urban Lifedecline on the Zambian Copperbelt since 1980, James Ferguson speaks of previous 'expectations of modernity' induced by copper mining, while Patience Mususa's ethnography 'There Used to Be Order' juxtaposes ZCCM policies with a neoliberal 'fending for oneself ' after privatisation. 4 On the Congolese Copperbelt, similarly, Donatien Dibwe dia Mwembu examines the trajectories of 'Bana Shaba' (children of copper) who have b…
Across the Copperbelt
The Central African Copperbelt, encompassing the mining communities of Katanga (DR Congo) and Zambia, has been central to the study of modernisation and rapid social and political change in urban Africa. This volume expands upon earlier studies of industrial mining, male-dominated formal labour organisation and political change by examining both sides of the border from pre-colonial history to the present and encompassing a wide range of economic…
Extractive industries and the environment
Resource extraction has historically caused dramatic environmental changes across the globe. Although mining and oil drilling have transformed landscapes and polluted the air and water wherever they have taken place, knowledge of how these environmental transformations have been experienced and lived in different parts of the world remains fragmentary. This special issue seeks to provide new insights into the environmental histories of resource e…
Oorlog, milieu en samenleving
Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community
Table ronde
Cette table ronde s’est tenue le 16 mars 2022 à la Maison de la recherche de l’Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès. Elle a été organisée par Antoine Acker (IHEID Genève) et Sébastien Rozeaux (Framespa), avec le soutien de l’IPEAT, de la Chaire Amérique latine, de l’Atelier d’écologie politique de Toulouse (Atecopol), de l’IHEID et du Fonds national suisse. Y ont participé Charles-François Mathis (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), José Augusto Pá…
Decarbonization, Democracy and Climate Justice
The Copperbelt of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo
The Central African Copperbelt, a region which straddles the boundary between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia, holds exceptionally rich and high-grade copper deposits. These deposits have been worked from as early as the 6th century ce . Still, the commencement of large-scale industrial resource extraction at the start of the 20th century, spurred by imperial rivalry between Belgian and British interests, initiated fundamental process…
Histories of Empire and Environmental Legacies in Africa
Societal debates about climate change have rekindled interest in environmental history approaches. This review article considers three recent books in African environmental history, on the Kruger National Park, the East African Groundnut Scheme, and on infrastructure in postcolonial Dar es Salaam. Why is it important to study the empire–environment nexus? How do African experiences relate to discussions on the Anthropocene? Taking environmental d…
A Planetary Anthropocene? Views From Africa
The Anthropocene is built on complex technological systems that span the globe. Historians of science have done much to document the emergence of this “technosphere.” Yet more interdisciplinary and regionally diverse approaches are needed to understand the complexity and unpredictability of the technosphere in our Anthropocene times. Rather than assuming a single planetary phenomenon, this essay emphasizes the widely varied lived experiences of t…
Mind the gap
Transitions away from fossil fuels need to be governed, financed, regulated and coordinated, patterns of production and innovation need to be steered and shaped by rulemaking bodies at all levels of authority. For this to happen across a highly uneven international system, global institutions have a vital role to play in supporting and implementing just transitions (JTs) that align with principles addressing the procedural, distributional, interg…
De klimaatcrisis als koloniale crisis
The climate crisis as a colonial crisis. Perspectives from African environmental history By reviewing recent works in African environmental history, this article explores the colonial roots of the Anthropocene. I argue that a historical approach is crucial to understand the current climate crisis and its planetary inequalities. This article traces colonial environmental injustices, through examples such as forestry, agriculture and hydroelectric …
Anthropocene Narratives of Living with Resource Extraction in Africa
African experiences have so far not been central to Anthropocene debates. While the Anthropocene usefully theorizes the planetary dimensions of environmental change, how do its propositions hold when applied to specific and widely divergent settings? Drawing from three examples-copper mining in Zambia, gold mining in South Africa, and oil drilling in Nigeria-this article examines varied experiences of environmental change in the Anthropocene. Res…
Toxic coloniality and the legacies of resource extraction in Africa
This review essay examines the colonial roots of toxicity caused by resource extraction across Africa, thereby foregrounding the persistent necropolitics of oil spills and mining waste dumps. Zooming in on examples of mining and oil drilling localities, with a particular focus on Johannesburg, the Central African Copperbelt and the Niger Delta, it sheds light on what coloniality entails. This article traces the long-term temporalities of extracti…
Politicised Environments
This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0
Political science (19 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Law (14 works) · Geography (13 works) · History (13 works) · African history and culture studies (10 works) · Economics (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · History (8 works) · Law (8 works)