Seizing Power Singh, Naunihal
2014, 2014-07-01
eBook
While coups drive a majority of regime changes and are responsible for the overthrow of many democratic governments, there has been very little empirical work on the subject. Seizing Power develops a ...new theory of coup dynamics and outcomes, drawing upon 300 hours of interviews with coup participants and an original dataset of 471 coup attempts worldwide from 1950 to 2000. Naunihal Singh delivers a concise and empirical evaluation, arguing that understanding the dynamics of military factions is essential to predicting the success or failure of coups.
Singh draws on an aspect of game theory known as a coordination game to explain coup dynamics. He finds a strong correlation between successful coups and the ability of military actors to project control and the inevitability of success. Using Ghana’s multiple coups as well as the 1991 coup attempt in the USSR, Singh shows how military actors project an image of impending victory that is often more powerful than the reality on the ground.
Singh tests his coordination theory by analyzing ten coups in Ghana from 1967 to 1981. In the process he identifies three distinct points of origination: coups from top military offices, coups from the middle ranks, and mutinous coups from low-level soldiers.
Singh’s theory will provide scholars with insight into the dynamics of authoritarian regimes, democratic transitions, and political instability. Seizing Power will appeal to scholars and students of civil-military relations, democracy transition studies, and the politics of Africa.
This book discusses the role of cultural practices and policy for sustainable development in West Africa across different artistic disciplines, including performance, video, theatre, community arts ...and cultural heritage. Based on ethnographic field research in local communities, the book presents findings on current debates of cultural sustainability in Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon and Benin. It provides a unique perspective connecting cultural studies, conflict studies and practical peacebuilding approaches through the arts. The first part pays particular attention to aspects of social cohesion and the circumstances of internally displaced persons e. g. caused by the Boko Haram insurgency in Northeast Nigeria. The second part focuses on cultural policy issues and challenges in the context of sustainable development, investigating participatory approaches and bottom-up processes, the role of governments and civil society, as well as performing arts organizations and universities in policy making and implementation processes. Performing Sustainability in West Africa presents research results and new methods on the role of artistic and cultural practices in conflict situations as well as current debates in cultural policy for researchers, academics, NGOs and students in cultural studies, sustainable development studies and African studies.
Assembling Export Markets explores the new ‘frontier regions’ of the global fresh produce market that has emerged in Ghana over the past decade. -Represents a major and empirically rich contribution ...to the emerging field of the social studies of economization and marketization -Offers one of the first ethnographic accounts on the making of global commodity chains ‘from below’ -Denaturalizes global markets by unpacking their local engagement, materially entangled construction, need for maintenance, and fragile character -Offers a trans-disciplinary engagement with the construction and extension of market relations in two frontier regions of global capitalism -Critically examines the opportunities and risks for firms and farms in Ghana entering global fresh produce markets
Ghana has committed politically, legislatively, and fiscally to providing universal health insurance coverage for its population with the intent of reducing financial barriers to utilization of ...health care.. However, under current cost and enrollment projections the system will not be financially sustainable in the long term, so there is more work to do. This book provides an important evidence-based review of the current performance of Ghana's health system and options for reform. As such, it provides an overall picture of the Ghana health sector, how things were and how things have changed, as well as a situational analysis of the performance of the health delivery and health financing systems using the latest available data. Finally, it discusses key reform issues and options in the context of the country's likely fiscal space. An important and valuable contribution of this book is its examination of how Ghana is performing compared to its neighboring countries and compared to other countries with similar incomes and health spending, providing global benchmarks for Ghana's health system performance.
Ghana has a youthful population of 24 million and has shown impressive gains in economic growth and in poverty reduction over the last two decades. The necessary sustained growth requires three ...critical steps: (1) increase productivity in the strategic economic sectors, (2) diversify the economy, and (3) expand employment. Raising the level and range of skills in the country provides a key contribution to these core drivers of sustained growth. Skills development in Ghana encompasses foundational skills (literacy, numeracy), transferable and soft skills, and technical and vocational skills. These skills are acquired throughout life through formal education, training, and higher education; on the job through work experience and professional training; through family and community; and via the media. This report focuses on one segment of Ghanas skills development system: formal and informal technical and vocational education and training (TVET) at the pre-tertiary level. Although TVET alone does not guarantee productivity gains or job creation, it is generally agreed that a blend of cognitive, non-cognitive, intermediate, and higher technical skills is crucial to enhance the countrys competitiveness and contribute to social inclusion, acceptable employment, and the alleviation of poverty. The public financing approach and general lack of incentives to improve TVET in Ghana help to perpetuate a supply-driven, low-quality skills system that responds very poorly to the needs of the economy, and especially its growth sectors. The national skills strategy should aim to complement, and be complemented by, reforms that are underway in related sectors (for example, private sector development and employment, the informal economy, information and communication technologies, and agriculture). One of the more innovative elements of the ongoing reform has been the establishment of sustainable financing for the skills development fund (SDF). Channeling the majority of TVET resources through a SDF will make it easier for funds to be allocated in line with general national socioeconomic priorities and specific priorities identified by Council for Technical and Vocational Education and Training (COTVET).
Brazilian-African Diaspora in Ghanais a fresh approach, challenging both pre-existing and established notions of the African Diaspora by engaging new regions, conceptualizations, and articulations ...that move the field forward. This book examines the untold story of freed slaves from Brazil who thrived socially, culturally, and economically despite the challenges they encountered after they settled in Ghana. Kwame Essien goes beyond the one-dimensional approach that only focuses on British abolitionists' funding of freed slaves' resettlements in Africa. The new interpretation of reverse migrations examines the paradox of freedom in discussing how emancipated Brazilian-Africans came under threat from British colonial officials who introduced stringent land ordinances that deprived the freed Brazilian- Africans from owning land, particularly "Brazilian land." Essien considers anew contention between the returnees and other entities that were simultaneously vying for control over social, political, commercial, and religious spaces in Accra and tackles the fluidity of memory and how it continues to shape Ghana's history. The ongoing search for lost connections with the support of the Brazilian government-inspiring multiple generations of Tabom (offspring of the returnees) to travel across the Atlantic and back, especially in the last decade-illustrates the unending nature of the transatlantic diaspora journey and its impacts.
Using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative analytical techniques, this book offers a comparative analysis of the policies of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama towards Ghana. The ...focus is on their economic aid, military aid, and immigration policy instruments.
Blending African social history with US foreign relations, John V. Clune documents how ordinary people experienced a major aspect of Cold War diplomacy. The book describes how military-sponsored ...international travel, especially military training abroad and United Nations peacekeeping deployments in the Sinai and Lebanon, altered Ghanaian service members and their families during the three decades after independence in 1957. Military assistance to Ghana included sponsoring training and education in the United States, and American policymakers imagined that national modernization would result from the personal relationships Ghanaian service members and their families would forge. As an act of faith, American military assistance policy with Ghana remained remarkably consistent despite little evidence that military education and training in the United States produced any measurable results. Merging newly discovered documents from Ghana's armed forces and declassified sources on American military assistance to Africa, this work argues that military-sponsored travel made individual Ghanaians' outlooks on the world more international, just as military assistance planners hoped they would, but the Ghanaian state struggled to turn that new identity into political or economic progress.
Ya no se trata de las novelas sobre un grupo social, como en Las novelas de la oligarquía chilena (2011), volumen que inaugura la serie, ni de un subgénero dentro de la novela moderna, como en Las ...novelas deformación chilena. Escenas de la vida en Chile y la oligarquía del centenario"); ¿cuáles son las relaciones entre vanguardia e industria cultural? ("María Luisa Bombai desde La última niebla a House ofmisť); ¿puede haber una vanguardia retrospectiva? ("Los detectives salvajes, de Roberto Bolaño, o de la vuelta a la madre"); etc. Otro rasgo distintivo de la novela sería su forma biográfica: esta se le presenta al lector como "una (auto)biografía ficcional, como un escrito en el que lo que se persigue y refiere es la historia de una vida" (p. 410). Críticos más interesados en encarecer su propia posición social -no muy segura, me da la impresión- que en aclararnos la de Martín, hablaron en el pasado de su origen de "clase media" y construyeron así la leyenda edificante del joven pobre, pero digno y respetuoso de las jerarquías sociales, que, gracias a su naturaleza, inteligencia y merecimientos mesocráticos y meritocráticos, logra triunfar en el seno de una clase patricia que no era tan insensible como lo suelen difundir las malas lenguas. Es decir, aquellos que, "por las causas que sean, han sido víctimas de los mordiscos sucesivos y el drenaje permanente que un orden político y social despiadado" le hace a la infancia (p. 118). En este entran en juego su capacidad para interpretar las obras con independencia de las lecturas canónicas, su desconfianza por las modas teóricas (bien conocida por sus lectores y alumnos); y su insistencia por leer desde aquí, desde la especificidad histórica y cultural en que se producen los textos (sobre este último punto, recomiendo el ensayo dedicado a la narrativa de Eltit). En estos tiempos de narraciones escuálidas, carentes de mundo y de ingenio, de ejercicios desvitalizados y fomes, El inútil de la familia nos recuerda que la novela actual no tiene la obligación de ser nada de eso, que como ocurre en las obras de los grandes maestros del siglo XIX el género puede y debe transformarse una vez más en una fuente de placer, (p. 289) Se revela aquí, nuevamente, la preferencia de Rojo por las novelas "novelescas", las que cuentan historias, las que creen en el arte de narrar, las que construyen personajes de una "humanidad profunda" (p. 9), tienen el poder de sorprendernos o de sacarnos carcajadas. Para finalizar, algunas de las preguntas que abre la lectura de este libro: ¿es la novela chilena, tal como la entiende Rojo, un fenómeno preponderantemente del siglo XX?, ¿para dónde va el género?; ¿cómo describir las obras que hoy se mueven hacia otros géneros, especialmente los de no ficción?, ¿son novelas?, ¿responden a tendencias pasajeras o continúan la historia de la novela chilena bajo otras formas?; ¿qué influencia tiene la literatura chilena decimonónica, más allá de Blest Gana, en la narrativa actual? REFERENCIAS Rojo, G. (2011).
aFA is a laboratory of the Institute of Architecture of the University for Applied Arts in Vienna, in which spatial, infrastructure, ecological and cultural phenomena of the Sub-Saharan region are ...investigated. The concept for each project is based on an interdisciplinary and trans-cultural approach.This publication documents three projects that were carried out between 2011 and 2015. GUABULIGA _ WELL BY THE THORN TREE / ON OTHER PLANNING in northern Ghana, STAGING APAM / ON OTHER ARCHITECTURE at Ghana's Atlantic coast, and LUBUNGAMODE / ON OTHER ARTISTIC RESEARCH in Kisangani, DR of Congo. The book illustrates the projects' creative processes and contexts, embedded in contemporary discourses - well-known experts from architecture, art, theory, and urban sociology take a stand.
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