Review of African Political Economy最新文献

{"title":"Crony capitalism in Nigeria: the case of patronage funding of the Peoples Democratic Party and the power sector reform, 1999–2015","authors":"O. Albert, I. Abada, Raymond Adibe","doi":"10.1080/03056244.2021.1958309","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2021.1958309","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The article argues that cronyism in the funding of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) explains the dismal record of the recent power sector reforms in Nigeria. It implies that the reforms were packaged by the then PDP-led government to benefit their major campaign financiers with contracts; thus, within this period the party financiers were able to assume a commanding position in the sector. The article further contends that the funding regime in the party reinforces corruption as financiers leveraged on their contributions to the party to ensure that the reform processes and outcomes reflected their economic interests. The case exemplifies the crony relationship between the business and the political class (that ought to act as the regulatory body), which is skewed towards primitive accumulation.","PeriodicalId":47526,"journal":{"name":"Review of African Political Economy","volume":"48 1","pages":"581 - 608"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43609649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contested compensation: the politics, economics and legal nuances of compensating white former commercial farmers in Zimbabwe","authors":"P. Moyo","doi":"10.1080/03056244.2021.1990033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2021.1990033","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In July 2020, the government of Zimbabwe and white former commercial farmers signed a Global Compensation Deed agreement of US$3.5 billion. Under this deal, and in line with Section 295 (3) of the constitution, white former farmers are ‘entitled to compensation from the State only for improvements that were on the land when it was acquired’. This article questions the political, financial and legal rationale of this agreement. First, it argues that the compensation deal is ultra vires since there is no enabling act of parliament to support it as required by the constitution. Consequently, this deal is tenuous and insidious. Second, Zimbabwe’s economic implosion and colossal foreign debt will make it difficult for international financial institutions to extend credit lines. Third, this deal reverses some land reform outcomes, thus raising political tensions. Fourth, these political tensions are swelling into resistance against the deal by war veterans and the opposition.","PeriodicalId":47526,"journal":{"name":"Review of African Political Economy","volume":"48 1","pages":"630 - 645"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44383052","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Seeking social justice in crisis: socio-economic rights and citizenship in post-2000 Zimbabwe","authors":"Kristina Pikovskaia","doi":"10.1080/03056244.2021.2001228","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2021.2001228","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The manifestations of the post-2000 economic crisis in Zimbabwe have long been a research subject for scholars who study issues of social justice in Zimbabwe. This article reviews three recent books written on the topic: Simukai Chigudu’s The political life of an epidemic: cholera, crisis and citizenship in Zimbabwe, Davison Muchadenyika’s Seeking urban transformation: alternative urban futures in Zimbabwe, and Building from the rubble: the labour movement in Zimbabwe since 2000, edited by Lloyd Sachikonye, Brian Raftopoulos and Godfrey Kanyenze. Although these works focus on different issues – a healthcare emergency, an urban housing crisis, and the labour movement’s decline, several themes cut across all of them: the economic and political crises, urban politics, experiences of citizenship, and social injustice. Addressing different socio-economic and political processes that emerged due to the crisis, the authors come to a common and important conclusion that despite the rigid political system and persisting social injustice, substantive and substantial changes in Zimbabwe may be achieved through grassroots social mobilisation and collective action.","PeriodicalId":47526,"journal":{"name":"Review of African Political Economy","volume":"48 1","pages":"656 - 666"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41996726","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reducing deforestation and forest degradation in Democratic Republic of Congo: market-based conservation in a context of limited statehood","authors":"C. Reyniers.","doi":"10.1080/03056244.2021.1997733","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2021.1997733","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) is an international mechanism linked to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. It has been described in the field of political ecology as the panacea of neoliberal nature conservation policies, in particular though the decreasing role of the state in the definition and implementation of forest policies in favour of market-based-mechanisms and non-governmental actors. The article explores the links between the privatisation of forest conservation and national sovereignty in the context of limited statehood through a case study in the Mai Ndombe province of the Democratic Republic of Congo. It proposes an original approach combining African political anthropology with Franz Neumann's political economy analyses of the power of authoritarian states. It argues that this model of forest conservation uses carbon accounting and results-based payment, which privileges private actors for the design and implementation of REDD+ activities; it also paradoxically strengthens Congelese state legitimacy.","PeriodicalId":47526,"journal":{"name":"Review of African Political Economy","volume":"48 1","pages":"509 - 528"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49395353","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Volume Index","authors":"","doi":"10.1080/03056244.2021.2037334","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2021.2037334","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47526,"journal":{"name":"Review of African Political Economy","volume":"48 1","pages":"677 - 681"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42083091","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Extractive capitalism and hard and soft power in the age of Black Lives Matter","authors":"R. Cline-Cole, P. Lawrence","doi":"10.1080/03056244.2021.2035536","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2021.2035536","url":null,"abstract":"As we go to publication, Omicron appears to be on the wane but there is no guarantee that it is the last of the Covid variants. Indeed, medical opinion seems to be accepting that Covid-19 in whatever variant may become endemic and be treated like influenza, with vaccinations as the means of keeping it under control. This was not the first reaction to Omicron, however, which was for the rich global North to reward South Africa, which had first identified the new variant and alerted the rest of the world to it, ironically by stopping South Africans entering their countries. While it has been hypothesised by medical scientists that the high number of South Africans with autoimmune disorders and illnesses, most notably HIV/AIDS, may have allowed more variants of Covid-19 to develop there so rapidly, it became clear that the Omicron variant had developed independently elsewhere. The irony of barring entry to travellers from South Africa was compounded by the global North’s ‘vaccine apartheid’ denying the South the power to protect their own populations. While the expectation in the global North may be that it can live with the virus, even though some countries, notably China and New Zealand, have successfully followed a zero-Covid strategy, the global South, lacking the same level of health care, with autoimmune diseases and a shortage of vaccines, cannot expect to be able to live with the virus without negative consequences leading to further impoverishment. The winner in all of this is of course Big Pharma. Oxfam International (2021) reports that corporates such as Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna have received US$8 billion from public funds while at the same time refusing to share their knowledge with countries of the global South that have neither the technological nor manufacturing capacity to produce the vaccine themselves. Meanwhile, it is reported that during the pandemic, from March 2020 to November 2021, the 10 richest men in the world have doubled their wealth (Oxfam International 2022), while Africa’s five richest men have seen their aggregate wealth grow by 38.5% over the same period (Africa Report 2021). The rest of this section of the editorial covers some recent developments which we see connecting the withdrawal of US and UK troops, following the Taliban victory in Afghanistan, to the French withdrawal in Mali. We discuss the outbreaks of civil and military conflict across Africa focusing on Ethiopia, Sudan and Mali, noting in the last case how the intended withdrawal of French troops mirrors the withdrawal of US and UK forces from Afghanistan in the sense of the imperial powers placing greater emphasis on ‘soft’ power. In particular, we focus on the soft power of foreign aid and how that has to some degree replaced the military involvement in Afghanistan and is intended to do so in Mali. We go on to discuss the particular case of the Commonwealth and its role in the spread of soft power and combating poverty – seen as a key cause of conf","PeriodicalId":47526,"journal":{"name":"Review of African Political Economy","volume":"48 1","pages":"497 - 508"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49214110","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Understanding West Africa’s informal workers as working class","authors":"J. McDermott","doi":"10.1080/03056244.2021.1967734","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2021.1967734","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Informal workers in Africa are very often portrayed as primarily self-employed entrepreneurs and unemployed individuals largely excluded from capitalism, and thus insulated from class analysis and class dynamics. Drawing on a case study of informal workers in Sierra Leone, the article challenges this dominant understanding, arguing that informal workers experience the reality of class relations and that their material lives are shaped by, and help to shape, broader dynamics of capital accumulation. The research applies a holistic class analysis rooted in Marxist and feminist thought, arguing for an understanding of informal workers, including even small-scale ‘self-employed’ individuals, as workers exploited by, and opposed to the interests of, capital. In so doing, it challenges the simple understandings of working class as existing only and exclusively through formalised wage work, in favour of a more complex and inductive understanding of the reality of global capitalism, highlighting the relevance of class, value and exploitation to the lived reality of informal workers in Africa.","PeriodicalId":47526,"journal":{"name":"Review of African Political Economy","volume":"48 1","pages":"609 - 629"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42868036","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Political protest in contemporary Kenya: change and continuities","authors":"N. Githethwa","doi":"10.1080/03056244.2021.1969131","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2021.1969131","url":null,"abstract":"The title of this book by Jacob Mwathi Mati attracts at first glance. It inspires the excitement of providing a lucid and deep analysis of the major waves of political protests in Kenya since indep...","PeriodicalId":47526,"journal":{"name":"Review of African Political Economy","volume":"48 1","pages":"670 - 673"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42968478","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The exclusionary politics of digital financial inclusion: mobile money, gendered walls","authors":"Mike Chipere","doi":"10.1080/03056244.2021.1972580","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2021.1972580","url":null,"abstract":"Dr Serena Natile’s book, titled Exclusionary politics of digital financial inclusion: mobile money, gendered walls, draws on gender as an analytical and methodological tool but also incorporates a ...","PeriodicalId":47526,"journal":{"name":"Review of African Political Economy","volume":"48 1","pages":"668 - 670"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47886846","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Social movements as learning spaces: the case of the defunct Anti-Privatisation Forum in South Africa","authors":"Mondli Hlatshwayo","doi":"10.1080/03056244.2021.1962838","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2021.1962838","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Social movements often become spaces for learning, although this type of learning has been overlooked by activists and scholars alike. Analysing the case of the collapsed Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF), the article submits that the APF was not only an organisation that challenged privatisation, but also a learning space for activists from middle-class and working-class backgrounds. Non-formal educational platforms, such as political education workshops, organisational and practical skill training sessions and campaigns organised by the APF and its partner organisations, were instrumental in transferring skills to community-based activists. After the demise of the APF, its activists applied the skills and competences they had acquired to continue advancing social and economic justice in other organisations. Furthermore, community-based activists educated middle-class activists about the conditions of working-class communities and the challenges of building working-class movements in post-apartheid South Africa.","PeriodicalId":47526,"journal":{"name":"Review of African Political Economy","volume":"49 1","pages":"209 - 225"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42556212","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}