This 2006 book reviews fifty years of research on politics in Africa. It synthesizes insights from different scholarly approaches and offers an interpretation of the knowledge accumulated over the ...years. It discusses how research on African politics relates to the study of politics in other regions. It focuses on such key issues as the legacy of a movement approach to political change, the nature of the state, the economy of a location, the policy deficit, the agrarian question, gender and politics and ethnicity and conflict. It ends by reviewing what scholars agree upon and what the accumulated knowledge offers as insights for more effective political and policy reforms. This book is for undergraduate and graduate courses in African and Comparative Politics as well as development-oriented courses in Political Science and related disciplines. It is also of great relevance to governance and development analysts and practitioners in international organizations.
Global imperial designs, which have been in place since conquest by western powers, did not suddenly evaporate after decolonization. Global coloniality as a leitmotif of the empire became the order ...of the day, with its invisible technologies of subjugation continuing to reproduce Africa's subaltern position, a position characterized by perceived deficits ranging from a lack of civilization, a lack of writing and a lack of history to a lack of development, a lack of human rights and a lack of democracy. The author's sharply critical perspective reveals how this epistemology of alterity has kept Africa ensnared within colonial matrices of power, serving to justify external interventions in African affairs, including the interference with liberation struggles and disregard for African positions. Evaluating the quality of African responses and available options, the author opens up a new horizon that includes cognitive justice and new humanism.
This book is a fascinating exploration of public opinion in sub-Saharan Africa. Based on the Afrobarometer, a comprehensive cross-national survey research project, it reveals what ordinary Africans ...think about democracy and market reform, subjects on which almost nothing is otherwise known. The authors find that support for democracy in Africa is wide but shallow and that Africans feel trapped between state and market. Beyond multiparty elections, people want clean and accountable government. They will accept economic structural adjustment only if it is accompanied by an effective state, the availability of jobs, and an equitable society. What are the origins of these attitudes? Far from being constrained by social structure and cultural values, Africans learn about reform on the basis of knowledge, reasoning, and experience. Weighing supply and demand for reform, the authors reach cautious conclusions about the varying prospects of African countries for attaining fully-fledged democracy and markets.0
Poverty in Africa is largely the outcome of slow growth. With the region hosting 10 percent of the world's population but a staggering 30 percent of the world's poor, the challenges it faces are ...enormous but NOT insurmountable. The message of this book is clear - poverty-eradicating development in Africa is possible. In fact, there are indications that Africa is at a turning point, and there is growing momentum among front-runner economies in the region toward higher and sustained growth. This study challenges African countries and their development partners to consolidate and continue this momentum and to exploit the advantages of the continent as a latecomer, particularly in innovation and in drawing lessons from successful export-led growth experiences in Asia and Latin America. "Challenges of African Growth" identifies opportunities, constraints, and strategic choices that African countries face in their quest for achieving the growth necessary for poverty alleviation. More important, the study provides a broad menu of stategic options for ensuring not only that countries embark on a growth path, but also that the growth is shared and sustainable. The critical areas for action rest on four pillars: the investment climate; infrastructure; innovation for increasing productivity and competitiveness; and institutional capacity.
In the aftermath of an armed conflict in Africa, the international community both produces and demands from local partners a variety of blueprints for reconstructing state and society. The aim is to ...re-formalize the state after what is viewed as a period of fragmentation. In reality, African economies and polities are very much informal in character, with informal actors, including so-called Big Men, often using their positions in the formal structure as a means to reach their own goals. Through a variety of in-depth case studies, including the DRC, Sierra Leone and Liberia, this comprehensive volume shows how important informal political and economic networks are in many of the continent's conflict areas. Moreover, it demonstrates that without a proper understanding of the impact of these networks, attempts to formalize African states, particularly those emerging from wars, will be in vain.
This book surveys the history of armed conflict in Africa in the period since decolonization and independence. The number of post-independence conflicts in Africa has been considerable, and this book ...introduces to readers a comprehensive analysis of their causes and character. Tracing the evolution of warfare from anti-colonial and anti-apartheid campaigns to complex conflicts in which factionalized armies, militias and rebel groups fight with each other and prey upon non-combatants, it allows the readers a new perspective to understand violence on the continent. The book is written to appeal not only to students of history and African politics, but also to experts in the policy community, the military and humanitarian agencies.
This volume studies elections as a core institution of liberal democracy in the context of newly democratizing countries. Political scientist Staffan I. Lindberg gathers data from every nationally ...contested election in Africa from 1989 to 2003, covering 232 elections in 44 countries. He argues that democratizing nations learn to become democratic through repeated democratic behavior, even if their elections are often flawed.
Refuting a number of established hypotheses, Lindberg finds no general negative trend in either the frequency or the quality of African elections. Rather, elections in Africa, based on his findings, are more than just the goal of a transition toward democracy or merely a formal procedure. The inception of multiparty elections usually initiates liberalization, and repeated electoral activities create incentives for political actors, fostering the expansion and deepening of democratic values. In addition to improving the democratic qualities of political regimes, a sequence of elections tends to expand and solidify de facto civil liberties in society.
Drawing on a wealth of data, Lindberg makes the case that repetitive elections are an important causal factor in the development of democracy. He thus extends Rustow's (1970) theory that democratic behavior produces democratic values.
The World Bank and Africa Harrison, Graham
2004, 20040601, 2004-08-01, 2004-06-01, 20040101, Letnik:
13
eBook
Shortlisted for the Inaugural International Political Economy Group annual book prize, 2006. An incisive exploration of the interventions of the World Bank in severely indebted African states. ...Understanding sovereignty as a frontier rather than a boundary, this key study develops a vision of a powerful international organization reconciling a global political economy with its own designs and a specific set of challenges posed by the African region. This analysis details the nature of the World Bank intervention in the sovereign frontier, investigating institutional development, discursive intervention, and political stabilization. It tackles the methods by which the World Bank has led a project to re-shape certain African states according to a governance template, leading to the presentation of 'success stories' in a continent associated with reform failure. This conceptually innovative book details a political economy of the World Bank in Africa that is both globally contextualized and attentive to individual states. It is the only volume to look at the bank's relations with Africa and will interest all students and researchers of African politics and the World Bank.
'Graham Harrison's The World Bank and Africa is an important contribution to this debate that situates recent interventions in the by the World Bank in Sub-Saharan Africa within a more diverse context of regional government structures.' - Adam David Morton, Modern African Studies
'Graham Harrison's analysis of governance states in Africa - linked to the shaping of a new terrain of intervention by the World Bank - is a winner.' - Adam David Morton, Modern African Studies
' The World Bank and Africa should be required reading across the study of political economy, development, post-colonial African studies, and historical sociology.' - Adam David Morton, Modern African Studies
Graham Harrison lectures politics at the University of Sheffield, UK. He is an editor of New Political Economy and Review of African Political Economy, and is currently working on the concept of empire in international relations, and administrative reform in Tanzania.
Section I. the Governance Encounter: The World Bank, Governance States and a New Sovereign Frontier Chapter 1: The Road to Governance: The World Bank and Africa Chapter 2: Governance States in Africa: Conceptualising the Encounter between the World Bank and the Sovereign Frontier Chapter 3. Conceptualising the World Bank: Governance and Global Régimes Section II. Constructing Governance States: Institutions, Discourse, Security Chapter 4: Introducing Post Conditionality Chapter 5: The Mechanics of Post Conditionality Chapter 6: Liberalism and the Discourse of Reform in Governance States Chapter 7: Securing Governance States Chapter 8: Neoliberalism's Revenge
