Bettina Engels is Guest Professor for Peace and Conflict Studies at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research and teaching focuses on agrarian change, class and labor, social movements and popular struggles, recent conflicts in the Sahel, and conflicts over land and mining. She is editor of the Handbook of Critical Agrarian Studies and the Review of African Political Economy.
MIASA Project: Social movements and popular protests in neo-colonial times
Bettina’s book tells the story of social movements and popular cross-class struggles against neo-colonialism and imperialism in Burkina Faso. It explores how social movements succeed in building cross-class alliances and sustaining struggles through periods of repression and moments of setbacks. In Burkina Faso, the fight against neo-colonialism and imperialism is the unifying element of protests that have been sparked by different issues and occasions and in which different actors have taken the leading role in each case. Recently, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and pan-African discourses have gained new significance in West Africa related to the multiple coups d´états and the takeover of power by military governments in the Sahel states.
The book provides an in-depth case study of social movement struggles in Burkina Faso, a particular case of persistent radical social struggles under difficult conditions, in order to intervene in the broader debate on strategies and visions of contemporary anti-capitalist, anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles.
Selected publications
Engels, Bettina; Artus, Ingrid; Birke, Peter (2025). Industrial relations, labour unions and strikes in Africa. Industrielle Beziehungen / The German Journal of Industrial Relations, forthcoming
Engels, Bettina (2025). The Crisis in Burkina Faso and the Coup Belt, in: Zeitschrift für Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12399-025-01022-z
Engels, Bettina (2024). Workers, protests and trade unions in Africa, Review of African Political Economy, 51(182), DOI: 10.62191/ROAPE-2024-0042
Engels, Bettina; Roy, Alexis (2023). Labour unions in the Global South in times of neoliberalism/Les syndicats du Sud global à l’ère néolibérale, Canadian journal of development studies/Revue canadienne d’études du développement, 44(1), 1-18, DOI: 10.1080/02255189.2023.2174088
Engels, Bettina (2023). Disparate but not antagonistic: Classes of labour in cotton production in Burkina Faso, Journal of Agrarian Change, 23(1), 149-166, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.12514
Engels, Bettina (2022). The Scale to be? Strategic Alliances in Cotton Production in Burkina Faso, Journal für Entwicklungspolitik XXXVIII, 2/3-2022, 108-129
Engels, Bettina (2022). Income opportunities for many or development through state revenues? Contested narratives on mining, Critical African Studies, 16(1), 71-89, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2022.2133732
Engels, Bettina (2021). All good things come from below? Scalar constructions of the ‘local’ in conflicts over mining Political Geography, 84, 102295, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102295
Akram-Lodhi, A. Haroon; Dietz, Kristina; Engels, Bettina, McKay, Ben (Eds) (2021): Handbook on critical agrarian studies, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar
Dietz, Kristina; Engels, Bettina (2020): Analysing land conflicts in times of global crises, Geoforum, 111, 208-217, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.02.019
