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
International treaties, conventions, and organizations to protect refugees were established in the aftermath of World War II to protect people escaping targeted persecution by their own governments. ...However, the nature of cross-border displacement has transformed dramatically since then. Such threats as environmental change, food insecurity, and generalized violence force massive numbers of people to flee states that are unable or unwilling to ensure their basic rights, as do conditions in failed and fragile states that make possible human rights deprivations. Because these reasons do not meet the legal understanding of persecution, the victims of these circumstances are not usually recognized as "refugees," preventing current institutions from ensuring their protection. In this book, Alexander Betts develops the concept of "survival migration" to highlight the crisis in which these people find themselves.
Examining flight from three of the most fragile states in Africa-Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Somalia-Betts explains variation in institutional responses across the neighboring host states. There is massive inconsistency. Some survival migrants are offered asylum as refugees; others are rounded up, detained, and deported, often in brutal conditions. The inadequacies of the current refugee regime are a disaster for human rights and gravely threaten international security. InSurvival Migration, Betts outlines these failings, illustrates the enormous human suffering that results, and argues strongly for an expansion of protected categories.
Once again, the Horn of Africa has been in the headlines. And once again the news has been bad: drought, famine, conflict, hunger, suffering and death. The finger of blame has been pointed in ...numerous directions: to the changing climate, to environmental degradation, to overpopulation, to geopolitics and conflict, to aid agency failures, and more. But it is not all disaster and catastrophe. Many successful development efforts at ‘the margins’ often remain hidden, informal, sometimes illegal; and rarely in line with standard development prescriptions. If we shift our gaze from the capital cities to the regional centres and their hinterlands, then a very different perspective emerges. These are the places where pastoralists live. They have for centuries struggled with drought, conflict and famine. They are resourceful, entrepreneurial and innovative peoples. Yet they have been ignored and marginalised by the states that control their territory and the development agencies who are supposed to help them. This book argues that, while we should not ignore the profound difficulties of creating secure livelihoods in the Greater Horn of Africa, there is much to be learned from development successes, large and small. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars with an interest in development studies and human geography, with a particular emphasis on Africa. It will also appeal to development policy-makers and practitioners.
This book examines the role of war in shaping the African state, society, and economy. Richard J. Reid helps students understand different patterns of military organization through Africa's history; ...the evolution of weaponry, tactics, and strategy; and the increasing prevalence of warfare and militarism in African political and economic systems. He traces shifts in the culture and practice of war from the first millennium into the era of the external slave trades, and then into the nineteenth century, when a military revolution unfolded across much of Africa. The repercussions of that revolution, as well as the impact of colonial rule, continue to this day. The frequency of coups d'états and civil war in Africa's recent past is interpreted in terms of the continent's deeper past.
Melancholia of freedom Hansen, Thomas Blom
2012., 20120722, 2012, 2012-07-22, 20120101
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The end of apartheid in 1994 signaled a moment of freedom and a promise of a nonracial future. With this promise came an injunction: define yourself as you truly are, as an individual, and as a ...community. Almost two decades later it is clear that it was less the prospect of that future than the habits and horizons of anxious life in racially defined enclaves that determined postapartheid freedom. In this book, Thomas Blom Hansen offers an in-depth analysis of the uncertainties, dreams, and anxieties that have accompanied postapartheid freedoms in Chatsworth, a formerly Indian township in Durban. Exploring five decades of township life, Hansen tells the stories of ordinary Indians whose lives were racialized and framed by the township, and how these residents domesticated and inhabited this urban space and its institutions, during apartheid and after.
Hansen demonstrates the complex and ambivalent nature of ordinary township life. While the ideology of apartheid was widely rejected, its practical institutions, from urban planning to houses, schools, and religious spaces, were embraced in order to remake the community. Hansen describes how the racial segmentation of South African society still informs daily life, notions of race, personhood, morality, and religious ethics. He also demonstrates the force of global religious imaginings that promise a universal and inclusive community amid uncertain lives and futures in the postapartheid nation-state.
Military coups are a constant threat in Africa and many former military leaders are now in control of 'civilian states', yet the military remains understudied, especially over the last decade. ...Drawing on extensive archival research, cross-national data, and four in-depth comparative case studies, When Soldiers Rebel examines the causes of military coups in post-independence Africa and looks at the relationship between ethnic armies and political instability in the region. Kristen A. Harkness argues that the processes of creating and dismantling ethnically exclusionary state institutions engenders organized and violent political resistance. Focusing on rebellions to protect rather than change the status quo, Harkness sheds light on a mechanism of ethnic violence that helps us understand both the motivations and timing of rebellion, and the rarity of group rebellion in the face of persistent political and economic inequalities along ethnic lines.
In a book full of directly applicable lessons for policymakers, Haley J. Swedlund explores why foreign aid is delivered in different ways at different times, and why various approaches prove to be ...politically unsustainable. She finds that no aid-delivery mechanism has yet resolved commitment problems in the donor-recipient relationship; bargaining compromises break down and have to be renegotiated; frustration grows; new ways of delivering aid gain traction over existing practices; and the dance resumes.
Swedlund draws on hundreds of interviews with key decision makers representing both donor agencies and recipient governments, policy and archival documents in Ghana, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda, and an original survey of top-level donor officials working across twenty countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. This wealth of data informs Swedlund's analysis of fads and fashions in the delivery of foreign aid and the interaction between effectiveness and aid delivery. The central message ofThe Development Danceis that if we want to know whether an aid delivery mechanism is likely to be sustained over the long term, we need to look at whether it induces credible commitments from both donor agencies and recipient governments over the long term.
Tropical Africa was one of the last regions of the world to experience formal European colonialism, a process that coincided with the advent of a range of new scientific specialties and research ...methods. Africa as a Living Laboratory is a far-reaching study of the thorny relationship between imperialism and the role of scientific expertise—environmental, medical, racial, and anthropological—in the colonization of British Africa.A key source for Helen Tilley's analysis is the African Research Survey, a project undertaken in the 1930s to explore how modern science was being applied to African problems. This project both embraced and recommended an interdisciplinary approach to research on Africa that, Tilley argues, underscored the heterogeneity of African environments and the interrelations among the problems being studied. While the aim of British colonialists was unquestionably to transform and modernize Africa, their efforts, Tilley contends, were often unexpectedly subverted by scientific concerns with the local and vernacular. Meticulously researched and gracefully argued, Africa as a Living Laboratory transforms our understanding of imperial history, colonial development, and the role science played in both.
The issue of biofuels has already been much debated, but the focus to date has largely been on Latin America and deforestation - this highly original work breaks fresh ground in looking at the ...African perspective. Most African governments see biofuels as having the potential to increase agricultural productivity and export incomes and thus strengthen their national economies, improving energy balances and rural employment. At the same time climate change may be addressed through reduction of green house gas emissions. There are, however, a number of uncertainties mounting that challenge this scenario. Using cutting-edge empirical case studies, this knowledge gap is addressed in a variety of chapters examining the effects of large-scale biofuel production on African agriculture. In particular, 'land grabbing' and food security issues are scrutinised, both of which have become vital topics in regard to the environmental and developmental governance of African countries. A revealing book for anyone wishing to understand the startling impact of biofuels and land grabbing on Africa.
Why are politicians able to form electoral coalitions that bridge ethnic divisions in some countries and not others? This book answers this question by presenting a theory of pecuniary coalition ...building in multi-ethnic countries governed through patronage. Focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, the book explains how the relative autonomy of business from state-controlled capital affects political bargaining among opposition politicians in particular. While incumbents form coalitions by using state resources to secure cross-ethnic endorsements, opposition politicians must rely on the private resources of business to do the same. This book combines cross-national analyses of African countries with in-depth case studies of Cameroon and Kenya to show that incumbents actively manipulate financial controls to prevent business from supporting their opposition. It demonstrates that opposition politicians are more likely to coalesce across ethnic cleavages once incumbents have lost their ability to blackmail the business sector through financial reprisals. Summary reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press