This book chapter is in Contesting Colonial Capitalism in the Americas, Africa, and Asia (2025), edited by the late Dip Kapoor, published by Routledge. It examines the movement against gene drive “extinction technology” in Burkina Faso, and how Burkinabé activists and farmers fought back against a project funded by Bill Gates to impose this new technology on the country.

The book Contesting Colonial Capital book is a critical excavation of capitalist development that is being driven by the Global North in the modern (neo)colonial era, with a related focus on the anticolonial and anticapitalist resistance by Indigenous Peoples, peasants, and migrant workers in Africa, Asia/Middle East, and the Americas/Caribbean.

Informed by the work of the late Dr. Abdul Aziz Choudry, the contributors demonstrate how Indigenous, peasant, and migrant worker learning in political action and knowledge production are essential for growing and sustaining social movements and organised struggles. The collection demonstrates how these resistances challenge racialized processes of territorial occupation, accumulation by dispossession, exploitation, and cultural and educational imperialism. Focusing on the regions of the Americas/Caribbean, Africa, Asia/Middle East, and across both settler and exploitation colonies, the chapters amplify Indigenous, peasant, and migrant worker activism and draw out critical perspectives pertaining to colonial capital.

The Indigenous, anticolonial, and anticapitalist politics highlighted in this book will be essential reading for activists engaged with international relations and social change. It will also inform the work of students and critical scholars of social movement and resistance studies, critical development studies, Indigenous studies, peasant and critical agrarian studies, migrant/labour studies, sociology, political science, and regional/area studies.