CMES Seminar: Harvesting wind, stirring sands: the expansion of renewable energy frontiers, local resistance, and the European academic gaze on green extractivism in West Asia and North Africa.

Presentation by Yahia Mahmoud, Human Geography, Lund University.

Yahia Mahmoud is an associate professor at the department of human geography (Lund University). Situated in the fields of development studies and development geography, his research has focused on rural areas in Africa and treated several interrelated themes that are relevant for these sub-disciplines. These topics span from assessing the role of China’s foreign assistance in rural West Africa to the potentials of technical innovation to curb the impacts of climate change and poverty in rural East Africa. When studying these phenomena, he puts special emphasis on knowledge construction, history, and power relations. The overall goal is to gain better understanding of the process of socio-economic transformation, in general, and that of poverty alleviation in particular. In the pursuit of this, he has collaborated with researchers from disciplines ranging from social to natural sciences, both in Sweden and abroad.