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This examination of the politics of ethnicity and nation-building in Africa stresses the trend towards subnationalist autonomy and away from a singular, state-centric system based on the Western model. Forrest ranges across the continent to explore a variety of subnational movements.
Democracies derive their resilience and vitality from the fact that the rule of a particular majority is usually only of a temporary nature. By looking at four case-studies, The Awkward Embrace studies democracies of a different kind; rule by a dominant party which is virtually immune from defeat. Such systems have been called Regnant or or Uncommon Democracies. They are characterized by distinctive features: the staging of unfree or corrupt elections; the blurring of the lines between government, the ruling party and the state; the introduction of a national project which is seen to be above politics; and the erosion of civil society. This book addresses major issues such as why one such democracy, namely Taiwan, has been moving in the direction of a more competitive system; how economic crises such as the present one in Mexico can transform the system; how government-business relations in Malaysia are affecting the base of the dominant party; and whether South Africa will become a one-party dominant system.
In Senegal, the Muridiyya, a large Islamic Sufi order, is the single most influential religious organization, including among its numbers the nation’s president. Yet little is known of this sect in the West. Drawn from a wide variety of archival, oral, and iconographic sources in Arabic, French, and Wolof, Fighting the Greater Jihad offers an astute analysis of the founding and development of the order and a biographical study of its founder, Cheikh Amadu Bamba Mbacke. Cheikh Anta Babou explores the forging of Murid identity and pedagogy around the person and initiative of Amadu Bamba as well as the continuing reconstruction of this identity by more recent followers. He makes a compelling ...
Cambodia's Second Kingdom is an exploration of the role of nationalist imaginings, discourses, and narratives in Cambodia since the 1993 reintroduction of a multiparty democratic system. Competing nationalistic imaginings are shown to be a more prominent part of party political contestation in the Kingdom of Cambodia than typically believed. For political parties, nationalistic imaginings became the basis for strategies to attract popular support, electoral victories, and moral legitimacy. Astrid Norén-Nilsson uses uncommon sources, such as interviews with key contemporary political actors, to analyze Cambodia’s postconflict reconstruction politics. This book exposes how nationalist imaginings, typically understood to be associated with political opposition, have been central to the reworking of political identities and legitimacy bids across the political spectrum. Norén-Nilsson examines the entanglement of notions of democracy and national identity and traces out a tension between domestic elite imaginings and the liberal democratic framework in which they operate
After examining immigrant political activity in the context of the rise of the racist Northern League, the book ends with a discussion of the possibilities that immigrant experiences are setting the stage for a new planetary working class movement."--BOOK JACKET.
The first book in the new Postcolonialism and Religions series offers a preview of the series focus on multireligious, indigenous, and transnational scholarly voices. In this book, the once arch enemies of Religious studies and Postcolonial theory become critical companions in shared analysis of major postcolonial themes.
This book is a lively life and times of Nana Asma'u (1793-1864), a West African woman who was a Muslim scholar and poet. As the daughter of the spiritual and political leader of the Sokoto community, Asma'u was a role model and teacher for other Muslim women as well as a scholar of Islam and a key advisor to her father as he waged a jihad to convert the population of what is now present day northwestern Nigeria to Islam. Asma'u's literary legacy, consisting of 65 poems in Arabic, Fulfulde and Hausa, constitutes one of the largest existing collections of 19th-century material from the region. Her poetry has been transmitted - even forged - over the years and is familiar to Hausa Muslims today, attesting to the power and continued relevance of her convictions and achievements. One Woman's Jihad provides a fascinating glimpse into the West African Muslim community at a pivotal point in its history.
Introduction / Anne-Maria Makhulu, Beth A. Buggenhagen, Stephen Jackson. - The search for economic sovereignty / Anne-Maria Makhulu. - "It seems to be going:" the genius of survival in wartime DR Congo / Stephen Jackson. - This is play : popular culture and politics in Côte d'Ivoire / Mike McGovern. - Self-sovereignty and creativity in Ghanian public culture / Jesse Weaver Shipley. - "May God let me share paradise with my fellow believers" : Islam's "female face" and the politics of religious devotion in Mali / Dorothea E. Schulz. - "Killer bargains" : global networks of Senegalese Muslims and the policing of unofficial economies in the war on terror / Beth A. Buggenhagen. - Border practices / Charles Piot.
Based on a political sociology of two families of religious scholars, al-Hakim and al-Khu'i, Elvire Corboz explains the internal workings of transnational leadership patterns in Shi'ism for the first time.
The colonial era in Africa, spanning less than a century, ushered in a more rapid expansion of Islam than at any time during the previous thousand years. In this groundbreaking historical investigation, Brian J. Peterson considers for the first time how and why rural peoples in West Africa "became Muslim" under French colonialism.Peterson rejects conventional interpretations that emphasize the roles of states, jihads, and elites in "converting" people, arguing instead that the expansion of Islam owed its success to the mobility of thousands of rural people who gradually, and usually peacefully, adopted the new religion on their own. Based on extensive fieldwork in villages across southern Mali (formerly French Sudan) and on archival research in West Africa and France, the book draws a detailed new portrait of grassroots, multi-generational processes of Islamization in French Sudan while also deepening our understanding of the impact and unintended consequences of colonialism.