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Party Proliferation and Political Contestation in Africa
This book analyzes several components of democratization and party competition in West Africa focusing on Senegal – a country with one of the longest histories of multiparty elections. It does so in service of examining the origins and consequences of the proliferation of political parties, a trend that has taken hold in Senegal and a variety of other African countries. The author uses novel sources of data to illuminate the economic and political roots of party functions and trajectories by placing party formation, opposition, ruling party loyalty, and presidential turnover into local and regional contexts. This work will appeal to African Studies scholars, professors, graduate students, and policy makers.
Constituents Before Assembly
When building democracy through new constitutions, the level of participation matters more than the content of the constitution itself. This book examines this theory.
Law, Security and the State of Perpetual Emergency
Presenting diverse contributors from legal, academic, and practitioner sectors, this book illustrates how the distinctions between international and domestic law are falling away in the context of security, particularly in the responses to terrorism, and explores the implications of these dramatic shifts in the normative order. Fundamental changes in the powers of the state and the rights of populations have accelerated since the globalized response to 9/11, creating effects that spread beyond borders and operate in a new, as yet under-conceptualized space. Although these altered practices were said to be in response to exceptional circumstances — a response to terrorism — they have become increasingly established in an altered baseline norm. This book explores the (inter)national implications of exceptional legal efforts to protect states’ domestic space in the realm of security.
Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities
The empirical starting point for anyone who wants to understand political cleavages in the democratic world, based on a unique dataset covering fifty countries since WWII. Who votes for whom and why? Why has growing inequality in many parts of the world not led to renewed class-based conflicts, seeming instead to have come with the emergence of new divides over identity and integration? News analysts, scholars, and citizens interested in exploring those questions inevitably lack relevant data, in particular the kinds of data that establish historical and international context. Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities provides the missing empirical background, collecting and examining a tr...
When Soldiers Rebel
Soldiers rebel when leaders attempt to build or dismantle ethnic armies, posing a deep challenge to contemporary democratization efforts.
The Rise of Authoritarianism in the Western Balkans
This book explores the stagnation of democracy in the Western Balkans over the last decade. The author maps regional features of rising authoritarianism that mirror larger global trends and, in doing so, outlines the core mechanisms of authoritarian rule in the Balkans, with a particular focus on Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia. These mechanisms include the creation of constant crises, the use of external powers to balance outside influences, as well as state capture. The authoritarian patterns exist alongside formal democratic institutions, resulting in competitive authoritarian regimes that use social polarization to retain power. As the countries of the Western Balkans aspire, at least formally, to join the European Union, authoritarianism is often informal.
Francophone African Women Documentary Filmmakers
Francophone African Women Documentary Filmmakers is groundbreaking edited collection which explores the contributions of Francophone African women to the field of documentary filmmaking. Rich in its scope and critical vision it constitutes a timely contribution to cutting-edge scholarly debates on African cinemas. Featuring 10 chapters from prominent film scholars, it explores the distinctive documentary work and contributions of Francophone African women filmmakers since the 1960s. It focuses documentaries by North African and Sub-Saharan women filmmakers, including the pioneering work of Safi Faye in Kaddu Beykat, Rama Thiaw's The Revolution Will Not be Televised, Katy Lena Ndiaye's Le Cercle des noyes and En attendant les hommes, Dalila Ennadre's Fama: Heroism Without Glory and Leila Kitani's Nos lieux interdits. Shunned from costly fictional- 35mm-filmmaking, Francophone African Women Documentary Filmmakers examines how these women engaged and experimented with documentary filmmaking in personal, evocative ways that countered the officially sanctioned, nationalist practice of show and teach/promote.
Competitive Authoritarianism
Based on a detailed study of 35 cases in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and post-communist Eurasia, this book explores the fate of competitive authoritarian regimes between 1990 and 2008. It finds that where social, economic, and technocratic ties to the West were extensive, as in Eastern Europe and the Americas, the external cost of abuse led incumbents to cede power rather than crack down, which led to democratization. Where ties to the West were limited, external democratizing pressure was weaker and countries rarely democratized. In these cases, regime outcomes hinged on the character of state and ruling party organizations. Where incumbents possessed developed and cohesive coercive party structures, they could thwart opposition challenges, and competitive authoritarian regimes survived; where incumbents lacked such organizational tools, regimes were unstable but rarely democratized.
Authoritarianism Goes Global
A distinguished group of contributors presents fresh insights on the complicated issues surrounding the authoritarian resurgence and the implications of these systemic shifts for the international order. This collection of essays is critical for advancing our understanding of the emerging challenges to democratic development.
Parties, Political Finance, and Governance in Africa
A major challenge for the advancement of democratic governance in Africa is the extraction of money by ruling parties from the state to fund their electoral campaigns and gain political advantage over opponents. Drawing upon in-depth case studies of Benin and Ghana, Rachel Sigman considers how, and with what consequences, party leaders control and access public funds to finance their political operations. Weaving together biographical data on government ministers, surveys of civil servants, elite interviews, and archival research, Sigman explains leaders' extraction strategies and connects these strategies to how politicians manage state personnel. In so doing, she challenges the perception of African states as uniformly weak and argues that effective government is possible even in contexts of widespread state politicization, corruption, and clientelism. Demonstrating the profound impact that extractive financing practices have on democratic institutions, Sigman illuminates and develops our understanding of “good governance” across the African continent.
