As African nations emerge more fully from the immediate postinde-pendence era, there is a pressing need to examine their security concerns from both African and global perspectives. Issues of strategic access and resources, superpower and regional conflict, economic growth and internal stability, and the role of African nations as a significant blo

States, corporations, and other actors worldwide have committed to measures aimed at bringing down global emissions to net zero by the year 2060 or earlier. While the need for a clean energy transition is clear, incoherently designed transition programs can pose complex environmental, social, and governance risks, including legal liability and protracted disputes. At the same time, the rush for minerals needed to manufacture clean energy technologies raises fundamental questions–most crucially, how to ensure the exploration and development of energy transition minerals in a manner that does not exacerbate resource conflicts, resource nationalism, human rights violations, protectionism, energy insecurity, social exclusions, and inequity, especially in conflict-affected and high-risk regions. By studying the legal and regulatory systems of Africa, Asia, Europe, Australasia, and North and South America through the themes of sovereignty, security and solidarity, Net Zero and Natural Resources Law provides an in-depth discussion of tools and techniques for addressing the legal and contract risks relating to the clean energy transition. This book offers a comprehensive and authoritative account of the nature, scope, and guiding principles of natural resources law and policy in a net zero era. Consideration is given to the integrated resource governance roadmap that is needed to improve coherence and coordination in the design, financing, and implementation of energy transition programs across the entire natural resource value chain.

In Varieties of Sovereignty and Citizenship, scholars from a wide range of disciplines reflect on the transformation of the world away from the absolute sovereignty of independent nation-states and on the proliferation of varieties of plural citizenship. The emergence of possible new forms of allegiance and their effect on citizens and on political processes underlie the essays in this volume. The essays reflect widespread acceptance that we cannot grasp either the empirical realities or the important normative issues today by focusing only on sovereign states and their actions, interests, and aspirations. All the contributors accept that we need to take into account a great variety of globalizing forces, but they draw very different conclusions about those realities. For some, the challenges to the sovereignty of nation-states are on the whole to be regretted and resisted. These transformations are seen as endangering both state capacity and state willingness to promote stability and security internationally. Moreover, they worry that declining senses of national solidarity may lead to cutbacks in the social support systems many states provide to all those who reside legally within their national borders. Others view the system of sovereign nation-states as the aspiration of a particular historical epoch that always involved substantial problems and that is now appropriately giving way to new, more globally beneficial forms of political association. Some contributors to this volume display little sympathy for the claims on behalf of sovereign states, though they are just as wary of emerging forms of cosmopolitanism, which may perpetuate older practices of economic exploitation, displacement of indigenous communities, and military technologies of domination. Collectively, the contributors to this volume require us to rethink deeply entrenched assumptions about what varieties of sovereignty and citizenship are politically possible and desirable today, and they provide illuminating insights into the alternative directions we might choose to pursue.

Focusing on a range of regional cases, the book evaluates the respective weight of national interest and internationalist (solidarity) considerations. Ultimately, while classical national interest considerations remain to this day a powerful motivation for power projection, the book shows how an enlightened conception of national interest can encompass solidarity concerns, and how such a balancing of the imperatives of both national interest and solidarity is the major challenge facing decision-makers.--Publisher's description.