Africa Spectrum最新文献

{"title":"Book Review: Nomades de Mauritanie by Himpan, Brigitte, and Diane Himpan-Sabatier","authors":"C. de Jong","doi":"10.1177/00020397221147063","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00020397221147063","url":null,"abstract":"Nomades de Mauritanie (Nomads of Mauritania) is an exceptionally comprehensive and very well-structured book on Mauritanian Nomad geography and culture written by the author and artist Brigitte Himpan and her daughter Diane Himpan-Sabatier. The book was published both in French by Academia-L’Harmattan in 2018 and in English by Vernon Press in 2019. Covering 460 pages and richly illustrated by 100 drawings and photos in meticulous detail, the book adopts a highly interdisciplinary approach covering all essential aspects of geography and Nomad culture of Mauritanie. Nomads of Mauritania immerses the reader into the cultural identity of Nomads via their religion, beliefs, language, values, and in particular their art. The book provides a new perspective on Mauritanian Nomad Art by identifying it as a “geometrically-abstract functional art” and defining it both as “ephemeral functional art” and “ephemeral living art.” The book contains nine chapters, beginning its first chapter with a detailed presentation of the Geography of Mauritanie, covering climate, hydrology, vegetation, fauna, population, mineral, and marine resources. This chapter ends with current problems of climate change and desertification including a valuable quantification of droughts since the 1970s. In its second chapter, the book introduces the history of Mauritanie, starting from prehistorical times, covering the ancient inhabitants of Mauritanie, the arrival of the first Berbers from India, the second wave of Berbers of Arab origin, Mauritanie during antiquity, the arrival of Arabs and Islam in North Africa and Mauritanie, the rise of African power in southern Mauritanie and the emergence of European maritime commerce, the control of the Mauritanian territory by the Moors, the different stages of colonisation ending with the country’s current status since independence and the Western Saharan war. Very capturing is the special focus on Nomadism in the third chapter, with an explanation of the factors leading to the onset of nomadism, interaction between nomadism and Moorish activities, its social organisation and daily life as well as the cultural and religious impacts of Nomadic Moors. Chapter four is closely related, revealing the Nomadic caste system and considering their hierarchy and activities from before 1981 up to their role in today’s Mauritanian society. Food security is then a central theme of chapter five, spanning the essential quest for water, breeding, data harvesting, and salt trade. Chapter six considers the material activities of Nomads, covering","PeriodicalId":45570,"journal":{"name":"Africa Spectrum","volume":"58 1","pages":"179 - 181"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49650175","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Nigeria and World War II, Colonialism, Empire, and Global Conflict by Korieh, Chima J.","authors":"S. Yakubu","doi":"10.1177/00020397221148211","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00020397221148211","url":null,"abstract":"It is no news that many African Nations actively participated in World War II that started in 1939 and ended in 1945. Military contingents were drawn from many African Nations and were used to fight on the side of the allied forces. Nigerians fought in a war that they knew little or nothing about. In this important, revisionist history, Chima J. Korieh examines how the lives of Nigerian producers, workers, merchants, men, women, and children from across society were affected. By placing the role that Nigeria played in the war within the contextual and theoretical frameworks of colonialism, race, gender, identity, labour, intellectual, and social history, Korieh challenges the dominant perception that World War II was primarily a European conflict and reveals the global impact of ordinary Nigerians on the war effort. Chima’s book, Nigeria and World War II. Colonialism, Empire, and Global Conflict, is divided into five chapters: list of figures, list of maps, list of tables, acknowledgments, list of abbreviations, an introduction, conclusion, bibliography and index. The thematic chapters examine important areas of the analysed issues in a chronological perspective. The author, in the introductory part of the book, explained the solidarity, efforts and involvement of Nigeria in the war. He stated that “On September 3, 1939, the day the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, declared war on Germany during the Second World War, members of the Ututu Clan Executive Committee in South Eastern Nigeria wrote a letter pledging loyalty and support to United Kingdom and the British Empire.” The committee wrote: “Though we are but poor farmers by trade, we are quite prepared to render any assistance which may come to our reach to our British Government who is fighting for world peace.” (1) Local regional leaders called for national unity (of all ethnic groups) and a common goal to defeat Hitler. A week after the British declared war on Germany, the Oba of Benin, Omonoba Akenzua II, called on Nigerians to “bury all our differences and use our strength, our money and everything in defence of our country and Britain (1).” It must be stated at this juncture that despite Nigeria’s active participation in World War II, all the major actions and gunfire were in Europe and Asia, all the diplomatic meetings, peace talks and cease-fire moves all took place outside Africa. Nigeria only sent military contingents, food supplies, solidarity messages and moral support etc. And of all major activities that brought the war to an","PeriodicalId":45570,"journal":{"name":"Africa Spectrum","volume":"58 1","pages":"108 - 110"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45326861","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Between Coups and Election: Constitutional Engineering and Military Entrenchment in Sudan","authors":"Hager Ali, Salah Ben Hammou, Jonathan M Powell","doi":"10.1177/00020397221136581","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00020397221136581","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates how armies re-entrench their power after thwarting democratic transitions. After the Sudanese military staged a coup in October 2021 and altered the transitional constitution, coup leader Abdelfattah al-Burhan announced the military's withdrawal in July 2022 after. We argue that these constitutional changes leveraged existing institutions in the military's favour to retain its influence over Sudanese governance. Using empirical evidence from Sudan's previous military takeovers to evaluate the post-coup constitutional engineering, the analysis finds that military control over the electoral commission as well as decentralisation will be determining factors moving forward. The timeframe between an anti-democratic coup and subsequent elections should be examined more carefully. Entrenching military power through elections requires a policy set up in advance, usually undertaken in this period. Thus, we provide key insights into how armies incrementally consolidate their power without radically overhauling existing institutions.","PeriodicalId":45570,"journal":{"name":"Africa Spectrum","volume":"57 1","pages":"327 - 339"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42847002","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Do Hegemonic-Party Regimes Reward or Punish Voters? A Tale of Distributive Politics in Tanzania","authors":"Francisco M. P. Mugizi, Parestico Pastory","doi":"10.1177/00020397221132571","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00020397221132571","url":null,"abstract":"Does resource allocation by the central government to local governments in Tanzania favour opposition or the ruling party's strongholds? The literature advances two opposing theories – electoral competition and hegemonic party hypotheses. We use unique data on fiscal transfers and human resource allocations to investigate the effect of electoral support on government allocations. Contrary to the two hypotheses, we find no political bias in fiscal resources transferred to local governments. Similarly, we find no strong evidence to suggest any political bias in human resource allocation. On the whole, neither does the evidence confirm nor conclusively disconfirm the two hypotheses. The findings imply that hegemonic-parties do not necessarily opt for a discriminative strategy in intergovernmental resource allocations even after facing a threatening opposition. Flexibility in autocratic menu and the path dependence of government's social policy are likely to explain this kind of hegemonic party's allocative behaviour.","PeriodicalId":45570,"journal":{"name":"Africa Spectrum","volume":"57 1","pages":"235 - 263"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45192732","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Africa and Sustainable Global Value Chains by Frei, Regina, Sherwat Ibrahim, and Temidayo Akenroye","authors":"Sören Scholvin","doi":"10.1177/00020397221134635","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00020397221134635","url":null,"abstract":"Africa has, for centuries, been an essential supplier of resources that are integral to a wide range of global industries. Understanding Africa depends on understanding the role of the continent in global value chains (GVCs). Academic and policy-oriented debates tend to focus on industrial upgrading in GVCs, neglecting environmental and social aspects, although Africa’s integration into GVCs has come along with worsening environmental and social conditions in many cases. Infamous examples are labour rights in Ethiopia’s textile sector and oil spills in the Niger Delta. This does not mean that there is no literature on such problems. Especially critical scholars have produced numerous articles and books that uncover the severe side effects of the continent’s participation in the world economy. Much less has been written on how GVCs in Africa can be made more sustainable. The volume Africa and Sustainable Global Value Chains provides corresponding insights. It consists of four sections. Section 1 presents background information and explains how corporations from overseas engage with Africa. It includes philosophical considerations (chapter 1), a literature-based overview of how large firms can push sustainability (chapter 2), a bibliometric analysis of the literature on GVCs and sustainability (chapter 3), and a calculation of what African countries gain and lose because of GVCs (chapter 4). Section 2 begins with a study on Nigeria that uncovers conditions essential to sustainable practices in agriculture (chapter 5). Challenges are shown with regard to smallholder coffee farming in Kenya (chapter 6) and the Zambian mining sector (chapter 7). A key message is that local suppliers need more support to implement sustainable practices. Section 3 comprises case studies on Nigeria’s trade policy and yam exports (chapter 8), the benefits and pitfalls of foreign investment in Ethiopia’s textile sector (chapter 9), as well as GVC participation of small businesses in handicraft in Egypt and Ghana (chapters 10 and 11). Section 4 shows what overseas corporations can do to promote sustainability, presenting insights from West Africa (chapter 12), Egypt (chapter 13) and Nigeria (chapter 14). Africa and Sustainable Global Value Chains has many merits. The authorship is diverse, consisting of colleagues from various African countries, as well as China, Europe and North America. It indicates cross-continental cooperation by several","PeriodicalId":45570,"journal":{"name":"Africa Spectrum","volume":"58 1","pages":"106 - 107"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47810518","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Uganda: The Dynamics of Neoliberal Transformation by Jörg Wiegratz, Giuliano Martiniello and Elisa Greco","authors":"T. Goodfellow","doi":"10.1177/00020397221132567","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00020397221132567","url":null,"abstract":"Uganda has long been renowned as a ‘poster child’ for the donor-sponsored policy reform agendas that took off in the 1980s and 1990s, from privatisation and economic liberalisation to decentralisation and deregulation. Despite this, and despite a wealth of literature on specific aspects of this reform agenda, there was until recently no book-length text that brought together critical scholarship on the diverse manifestations and ramifications of the ‘neoliberal turn’ as it played out across Uganda’s economy and society. This book fills that gap, and in so doing makes an important contribution to the broader literature on the scope of neoliberal policies, their role in international aid, and the ways in which they can realign societies with long-term implications. As the editors of the volume themselves note, the earlier landmark collections on Uganda edited by Hansen and Twaddle (including 1988’s Uganda Now, 1991’s Changing Uganda and 1998’s Developing Uganda) have not been followed by similarly focused edited works, despite a plethora of articles and monographs on Uganda’s development in the two and half decades since. Moreover, these earlier collections in some respects described the remarkable changes and policy reforms that began to transform Uganda in the late 1980s and 1990s without the temporal distance to be able to critically reflect on them and their societal consequences. Remarkably, decades on Yoweri Museveni remains in power, and while there have been some important policy shifts (not to mention global political economic upheavals) since the early neoliberal period, there is a significant degree of continuity and deepening of neoliberal institutions. In this respect, this book is sorely needed, and its critical and interdisciplinary perspective is very welcome. In offering an analysis of the manifold ways in which the neoliberal orientation has permeated policy, economy and society in Uganda, this book goes beyond standard analyses of neoliberal reforms – and does so by drawing in an impressive range of scholars. It is divided into four sections: the state, donors and development aid; economic restructuring and social services; extractivism and enclosures; and race, cultures and commoditisation. While all four of these offer an excellent selection of academic analyses, it is in some ways the third and fourth sections that push most beyond the","PeriodicalId":45570,"journal":{"name":"Africa Spectrum","volume":"57 1","pages":"343 - 345"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46604614","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Systematic Review of Gender and Humanitarian Situations Across Africa","authors":"Chikezirim C. Nwoke, Logan Cochrane","doi":"10.1177/00020397221128322","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00020397221128322","url":null,"abstract":"For decades, as evidenced in programming and research, the humanitarian community has recognised gender equality and equity as integral to effective programming and response. Drawing upon ninety-nine publications indexed on the Web of Science and Google Scholar, this paper explores available evidence on gender and crisis settings in Africa to synthesise and critically analyse what is being learned. We found that limited research and programming have explicitly aimed to have gender transformative impacts, and those that do fail to adequately declare or reflect on the biases and intricacies of aiming to transform social norms in complex sociocultural contexts. Additionally, this review examines the trend of the body of research, highlighting the affiliation of authors and the geographical areas of focus. Evidence shows that research in this area is dominated by scholars affiliated with institutions in the Global North, raising questions relating to knowledge production and epistemic injustice in Africa.","PeriodicalId":45570,"journal":{"name":"Africa Spectrum","volume":"57 1","pages":"301 - 326"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47154442","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Necropolitics. Theory in Forms, by Achille Mbembe, Duke University Press, 2019","authors":"Saswat Samay Das, Dibyendu Sahana","doi":"10.1177/00020397221087747","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00020397221087747","url":null,"abstract":"In his book Necropolitics, published in late 2019, Mbembe does not restrict himself to showing us new ways of critiquing democracy. Rather he offers us a new critical grammatology so we could work out a configuration that may stand as an alternative to democracy and the ethical tone and temper of the coming time. This is because, for Mbembe, contemporary forms of democracies have ended up becoming necropolitical, though with their workings democracies have always reflected their constitutive biopolitical orientation. For him, necropolitics stands as a politics of ‘selective elimination’ or negation of diverse blocs of masses that the state machinery considers resistant or redundant to its workings and policies, while biopolitics aims to control and govern the masses or better the dynamic expanse of life. If biopolitics yields what is called ‘a control society’ that engineers and subjects the masses to strategies of surveillance and control in order to govern them, necropolitics yields ‘a society of enmity’. This happens to be a society that aims at altogether dispensing with the inherent revolutionary potential of masses by systematically and routinely decimating them – killing the poor to eradicate the rebellious discontentment of poverty and killing the powerless to form a tiny section of powerful elites, as one may say. Such a society feverishly creates new grounds or conditions propitious for strategical praxis of necropolitics. Further, as necropolitics works by turning death into a profitable industry, a society that becomes necropolitical ends up engineering death-making institutions only to treat masses as grist for the smooth working of these institutions. Mbembe segments the book into eight parts – six chapters preceded with an introduction and followed by a conclusion. In these chapters, Mbembe describes the unfolding patterns of global apartheid while vehemently critiquing democracies’ bio-political machinery’s nuanced exploitation of such patterns. Mbembe points out that democracies become necropolitical when they spearhead war against other nations in order to sustain forms of global apartheid. To make his point, Mbembe cites examples from every corner of the world, in particular, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the Gulf War, the American War of Secession, the Crimean War, and “three main dirty wars of decolonization (Indochina, Algeria, Angola and Mozambique).”","PeriodicalId":45570,"journal":{"name":"Africa Spectrum","volume":"57 1","pages":"220 - 222"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65173366","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Catholic Missionary Work and “Political” Support: The Tokombéré Youth Centre Since 1974","authors":"Baskouda S. K. Shelley","doi":"10.1177/00020397221112437","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00020397221112437","url":null,"abstract":"This paper studies how the Tokombéré Youth Centre, a secular place attached to the Roman Catholic Church, has led to the political formation of young people in Tokombéré, northern Cameroon. This is a place of socialisation that grew from the missionaries’ work, and which has politically guided youth since 1974 through an awakening based on empowerment and self-reliance. The Centre, with its members structured within a “government,” has helped foster the values of citizenship through activities like Youth Weeks, Kirditude days, amateur journalistic writing in the newspaper Kudumbar, and film screenings. This substitution for the state has sometimes been a source of conflict, sometimes of co-existence.","PeriodicalId":45570,"journal":{"name":"Africa Spectrum","volume":"57 1","pages":"282 - 300"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47171575","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Undoing Coups. The African Union and Post-coup Intervention in Madagascar by Antonia Witt","authors":"Christof Hartmann","doi":"10.1177/00020397221110590","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00020397221110590","url":null,"abstract":"The recent wave of military coups from Sudan to Guinea, and from Mali to Burkina Faso might have come as a surprise to many observers given the longstanding commitment of African regional organizations to a policy of ‘zero tolerance’ against unconstitutional changes of government. Deposed incumbents did not return to their presidential office in any of these cases, and while putschists faced sanctions by regional bodies, it seemed very difficult for either the African Union or ECOWAS to re-establish constitutional order. Reading Antonia Witt’s excellent monograph might help to better grasp why and how regional organizations struggle to enforce their unconstitutional change of government (UCG) rules. In these recent coups and the ensuing negotiations two aspects are particularly striking, which also feature prominently among Witt’s key arguments: While African regional organizations might have developed an impressive set of legal norms about when an unconstitutional change of government occurs, it is less clear what would qualify as a return to constitutional rule, and how to assess the messy politics of transitional governments and electoral engineering in this regard. Second, what is considered legitimate in the eyes of regional authority holders (say 6 months or 4 years of transition, the actual degree of inclusiveness of electoral processes) is not fixed in some legal protocol but results from negotiations between domestic and regional actors, and ‘the international’ thus becomes a constitutive part of re-creating political order within African countries. One of the many achievements of the book is to put emphasis on the fact that the international, or better transnational ordering mainly involves different African actors and organizations, and is not another instance of US–China rivalry or Bretton Woods conditionality. And indeed, moving beyond the practices in other parts of the world, African regional organizations have appropriated themselves the right to set standards of legitimate domestic political order within member states, and to take decisions, which do affect access to power, in Côte d’Ivoire, Mali or Madagascar. The book which is based on Antonia Witt’s PhD thesis both advances an innovative theoretical argument about how we should study post-coup regional interventions and","PeriodicalId":45570,"journal":{"name":"Africa Spectrum","volume":"57 1","pages":"340 - 342"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47181826","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}