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Civil society is one of several Western political and social concepts that have not traveled successfully to Africa. Revived in response to the search for democracy in Eastern Europe during the late Soviet era, Western donors promoted and funded new civil society organizations in sub-Saharan Africa, regarding them as an essential grounding for African democratization. Most of these new civil society organizations had little in common with African associational activity. Focusing on the characteristics and behavior of longstand-ing African organizations would appear a better starting point for developing a useful concept of an African civil society. One candidate worth serious investigation is the Buganda Kingdom Government. This organization violates most distinctions central to Western notions of civil society. Yet it continues to behave like a civil society organization. Its political and conceptual collisions offer guidance toward a useful notion of African civil society and understanding Ugandan politics.
This is the first book to examine and compare how rebels govern civilians during civil wars in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Drawing from a variety of disciplinary traditions, including political science, sociology, and anthropology, the book provides in-depth case studies of specific conflicts as well as comparative studies of multiple conflicts. Among other themes, the book examines why and how some rebels establish both structures and practices of rule, the role of ideology, cultural, and material factors affecting rebel governance strategies, the impact of governance on the rebel/civilian relationship, civilian responses to rebel rule, the comparison between modes of state and non-state governance to rebel attempts to establish political order, the political economy of rebel governance, and the decline and demise of rebel governance attempts.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.
This collection explores the relationships of class and state in contemporary African politics.
Writers and analysts have uncovered the illegal role of private militias’ commanders in Afghanistan. These commanders and self-styled leaders were driven overwhelmingly by their personal power, and they were not only considered illegitimate on the domestic political scene, and viewed as irrelevant. The present Afghan government is a mix of all types of its efforts, including war criminals, and militia commanders who smuggle narcotics, drugs, arm, and kill women and children. War criminals and militias commanders have developed complex survival and legitimation strategies beyond their territorial realms. After years of its establishment, the Afghan local police (ALP) was undermined due to i...
Featuring a broad range of perspectives on the democratic process, this collection of essays explores the development of civil society and how civil societies manage democratic change around the world.
"The country-specific chapters serve to underline the differences between African democracy and liberal democracy, yet some authors are at pains to emphasize that whatever their limitations, African democracies are an advance over what had gone before." -- African Studies Review
Explores how international law deals with detention conducted by non-State armed groups and the motivations behind these practices.
Decolonization of knowledge has become a major issue in African Studies in recent years, brought to the fore by social movements such as #RhodesMustFall and #BlackLivesMatter. This timely book explores the politics and disputed character of knowledge production in colonial and postcolonial Uganda, where efforts to generate forms of knowledge and solidarity that transcend colonial epistemologies draw on long histories of resistance and refusal. Bringing together scholars from Africa, Europe and North America, the contributors in this volume analyse how knowledge has been created, mobilized, and contested across a wide range of Ugandan contexts. In so doing, they reveal how Ugandans have built...