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Richard Joseph's seminal 1987 book Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria represented a watershed moment in the understanding of the political dynamics of Nigeria. This groundbreaking collection brings together scholars from across disciplines to assess the significance of Joseph's work and the current state of Nigerian politics.
In Cultivating Moral Citizenship, ethnographer, Jude Fokwang unpacks the meanings, mechanisms and processes through which young people in an inner city of the West African nation of Cameroon respond to local and global challenges as they seek to position themselves as social adults. Faced with the decline of old predictabilities, the diminishing capacity of the postcolonial state to control its destiny and the precarity of waithood, young people instrumentalise the opportunities and resources afforded by associations to build reciprocal relationships that advance their individual and collective pursuits in a community that has increasingly become transnational. In positioning themselves as moral actors, the young people in this ethnography invest in high profile social and communal projects, including the enforcement of moral orthodoxies that enable readers to appreciate the ways in which moral citizenship is engendered, expanded and eroded simultaneously.
Multi-disciplinary examination of the role of ordinary African people as agents in the generation and distribution of well-being in modern Africa. What are the fundamental issues, processes, agency and dynamics that shape the political economy of life in modern Africa? In this book, the contributors - experts in anthropology, history, political science, economics, conflict and peace studies, philosophy and language - examine the opportunities and constraints placed on living, livelihoods and sustainable life on the continent. Reflecting on why and how the political economy of life approach is essential for understanding the social process in modern Africa, they engage with the intellectual o...
Failed attempts in Africa to develop, democratise and instil virtues of a just state and society which promote benevolent leadership and advance political and economic rights and freedoms call for a ‘new’ imagination. By exploring a wide range of issues concerning justice, human rights and leadership, this book makes two major contributions to the extant literature in each of these areas. Firstly, as a project in decoloniality, it constitutes an ‘epistemic break’ from mainstream logics and approaches to understanding state, society and development in Africa, presenting an approach that is filtered through a Euro-American lens that reifies the hegemony of a particular spatio-temporali...
When scholarship presents the histories, belief systems, and ritual patterns of specific religious groups, it often privileges victorious and élite fractions of those communities to the detriment and neglect of alternative, dissonant, and resurgent voices. The contributions in this volume, which include case studies on various religious and academic contexts, illustrate the importance of listening to those alternative voices for the study of religion.
Examines the variety of mostly unorganized and informal ways in which Africans exercise agency and resist state power in the 21st century, through citizen action and popular culture, and how the relationship between ruler and ruled is being reframed.
This volume examines the relationship between hope, mobility, and immobility in African migration. Through case studies set within and beyond the continent, it demonstrates that hope offers a unique prism for analyzing the social imaginaries and aspirations which underpin migration in situations of uncertainty, deepening inequality, and delimited access to global circuits of legal mobility. The volume takes departure in a mobility paradox that characterizes contemporary migration. Whereas people all over the world are exposed to widening sets of meaning of the good life elsewhere, an increasing number of people in the Global South have little or no access to authorized modes of international...
Drawing on field-based data and experiences from the practice of democratic decentralization and local governance over the last three decades in Ghana, this book examines whether and how democratic decentralization and local governance reforms in developing countries have produced the anticipated development outcomes. In seventeen related contributions, the authors present four relevant focal themes, including conceptual and historical trajectories of decentralization and local governance; institutional choice, democratic representation, and poverty reduction; local governance, resource capacity, and service delivery; and non-state actors, local governance and sustainable development. The book blends perspectives of scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers to provide a holistic analysis of linkages between decentralization, local governance, and sustainable development efforts, presenting a novel and useful guide for science, policy, and practice of bottom-up governance and development. It provides relevant lessons and experiences for scholars, policy-makers, and development practitioners in Africa in particular and developing countries in general.
b”CLASSIFY, EXCLUDE, POLICE‘Laurent Fourchard’s deep, first-hand knowledge of the history and contemporary politics of Nigeria and South Africa forms the basis of an insightful and compelling analysis of how states produce invidious distinctions among their people and at the same time how political linkages are forged between state and society, elites and subalterns, bureaucratic structures and personal relations.’ Frederick Cooper, Professor of History, New York University, USA ‘Violence, control, police and political order are essential dimensions of metropolis. In this exceptional book, Laurent Fourchard compares decentralised exercises of authority in providing vivid analysis o...