African Affairs最新文献

Strategizing for quality elections in Africa: party capacity and the politics of vigilance in Ghana 非洲高质量选举策略：加纳政党能力与警惕性政治

IF 2.8 1区社会学

African Affairs Pub Date : 2025-06-27 DOI: 10.1093/afraf/adaf014

Samuel Koranteng Anim

{"title":"Strategizing for quality elections in Africa: party capacity and the politics of vigilance in Ghana","authors":"Samuel Koranteng Anim","doi":"10.1093/afraf/adaf014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adaf014","url":null,"abstract":"In 2016, Ghana’s New Patriotic Party (NPP) adopted innovative anti-rigging strategies as part of its successful campaign to defeat its main rival. This electoral vigilance system included a nationwide deployment of party agents, digitized parallel tabulation of results, and novel fundraising schemes. The move has been recognized in media and scholarly discussions. However, we still lack a deeper understanding of the NPP’s strategy and the conditions that enabled the party to implement it successfully. Analysing the key logistical, organizational, and procedural aspects of the NPP’s efforts, I argue that electoral vigilance can best be understood as a bundle of tactics that must be adopted and implemented simultaneously on a large scale to have substantive democratic impacts. The NPP honed and fully deployed its already extensive organizational capacities to support its vigilance interventions. This suggests that only parties with established bureaucratic structures, large membership, and professionalized staff, among other features, can translate their existing organizational resources into effective electoral vigilance interventions. Moreover, the NPP’s efforts worked because Ghana’s democratic environment supported these attempts to improve electoral quality. This shows that effective strategizing against manipulation is a product of organizationally complex parties operating in favourable political settings.","PeriodicalId":7508,"journal":{"name":"African Affairs","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144513237","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Dark humour, social media, and everyday violence in Nigeria: gbaa ya ọkụ in Onitsha city 尼日利亚的黑色幽默、社交媒体和日常暴力：gbaa ya ọkụ在奥尼察市

IF 2.8 1区社会学

African Affairs Pub Date : 2025-06-26 DOI: 10.1093/afraf/adaf013

Mathias Chukwudi Isiani

{"title":"Dark humour, social media, and everyday violence in Nigeria: gbaa ya ọkụ in Onitsha city","authors":"Mathias Chukwudi Isiani","doi":"10.1093/afraf/adaf013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adaf013","url":null,"abstract":"The roots of aggression and revolt in Nigeria, as in many African countries, can be traced to urban areas. Cities have also become vibrant environments where citizens openly express humour about their everyday lives, engage in ridicule regarding their economic and social challenges, and share jokes about society, government, and the credibility of institutional agencies in safeguarding lives and property. Urban Onitsha, a city populated by migrants in Anambra State, Southeast Nigeria, stands as a troubled metropolis characterized by both criminals and armed community groups seeking to control crime. The latter, predominantly made up of frustrated civilians, regularly engage in the unlawful practice of gbaa ya ọkụ (burn him/her/them), which involves capturing and burning alleged criminals with car tires (necklacing) and gasoline, while also maintaining humorous expressions at the locations where the act was performed. This article argues that the humorous use of gbaa ya ọkụ is an active expression in Onitsha that underscores necklacing as a performative act used to attract government attention to economic and social issues, entertain the public on how to treat victims’ bodies, and raise inquiries about the prevailing social order within the contemporary African urban context. The research investigates the choice of locations and spaces where acts of necklacing occur in Onitsha and questions their significance in exploring their use as hashtags on social media. The research, while using Onitsha city as a study area to examine violence as a humorous graphic display and postcolonial governance in Africa, draws on autoethnography, eyewitness accounts, ethnography, and interviews in Onitsha to further understand the context within which this public violence happens, and why the police and other armed forces are unable to quell it.","PeriodicalId":7508,"journal":{"name":"African Affairs","volume":"656 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144513269","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

state-building, infrastructure, and citizenship in rural tanzania: persistence and change in nyumba kumi kumi (the 10-house cell) 坦桑尼亚农村的国家建设、基础设施和公民身份：nyumba kumi kumi（10户牢房）的持续存在和变化

IF 2.8 1区社会学

African Affairs Pub Date : 2025-06-25 DOI: 10.1093/afraf/adaf011

Kristin D Phillips, Aikande Kwayu

{"title":"state-building, infrastructure, and citizenship in rural tanzania: persistence and change in nyumba kumi kumi (the 10-house cell)","authors":"Kristin D Phillips, Aikande Kwayu","doi":"10.1093/afraf/adaf011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adaf011","url":null,"abstract":"An enduring feature of rural Tanzanian political life has been the organization of villages down to the 10-house cell (nyumba kumi kumi). The cell system was established in 1963 as the smallest unit of the single-party state to eradicate rural isolation and facilitate communication, security, and self-help. Even after the 1992 turn to multipartyism, the cell has endured as a salient (though not static) feature of rural government. Existing scholarship has theorized the cell’s significance for political linkage, state spatialization, and party entrenchment, highlighting ongoing state appropriation of this party structure. But the cell has also been central to how rural Tanzanians experience and produce the functionality of the rural state to ensure the conditions for meeting basic needs. Based on a case study from the Singida region, and comparative perspectives from other parts of Tanzania, this article argues that the 10-house cell is both an infrastructure of rural statecraft but also of rural citizenship, enabling vital functions such as communication, adjudication, security, surveillance, taxation, development, and claims-making. Tracing how Tanzanians have used nyumba kumi kumi to exercise (and grow) the functionality of the state from below expands notions of state-building in Africa beyond notions of ‘reach’ and ‘capture’ from above.","PeriodicalId":7508,"journal":{"name":"African Affairs","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144513329","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Navigating the post-donor arena in Uganda’s Gulu district 在乌干达古卢地区引领捐赠后的舞台

IF 2.8 1区社会学

African Affairs Pub Date : 2025-06-25 DOI: 10.1093/afraf/adaf012

Sophie Komujuni

{"title":"Navigating the post-donor arena in Uganda’s Gulu district","authors":"Sophie Komujuni","doi":"10.1093/afraf/adaf012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adaf012","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the strategies that members of a post-donor society devised to deal with the donor exit. The post-donor phenomenon describes complex and multiple dynamics that result from a dramatic reduction in the presence and funding of international donors or aid agencies. This phenomenon creates losers and winners in the face of changed opportunities, power, and authority. Gulu in northern Uganda provides an excellent example of this phenomenon. Once thronged by international humanitarian agencies, there was a mass exit of the same in the decade starting in 2013. I argue that to navigate the post-donor arena successfully, society needs significant levels of agency, both individual and collective (including) institutional agency. The lack of clear exit strategies and a sustainability plan on the side of this industry, as well as the incapacity and unwillingness of the government to fill the gap, determined how the post-donor period has played out. Established actors have had to devise new ways to access scarce donor funding, turn to the private sector, or face severe hardship. Simultaneously, the sudden departure of many international organizations and their funding freed space for new entrants, such as multilateral organizations and private companies, to exploit available resources. The article reveals the challenges in the successful navigation of the post-donor arena by individuals, organizations, and agencies, and how agency leads to an uneven mix of losers and winners.","PeriodicalId":7508,"journal":{"name":"African Affairs","volume":"373 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144513331","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Building an idea of the state? Regime dominance and the material legacy of a development project in Ethiopia 建立一个国家的概念？埃塞俄比亚一个发展项目的政权统治和物质遗产

IF 2.8 1区社会学

African Affairs Pub Date : 2025-05-13 DOI: 10.1093/afraf/adaf008

Justin Williams

{"title":"Building an idea of the state? Regime dominance and the material legacy of a development project in Ethiopia","authors":"Justin Williams","doi":"10.1093/afraf/adaf008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adaf008","url":null,"abstract":"A growing body of research argues that development assistance bolsters authoritarian regimes in Africa, but its impact on regime dominance remains underexplored. This article traces the material legacy of an ambitious rural development project in Ethiopia, including its ideational elements, and reveals its consequences for the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), the incumbent regime at the time. The Merhabete Integrated Rural Development Project, implemented by the non-governmental organization Menschen für Menschen between 1988 and 2009, built clinics, schools, a hospital, offices, roads, and other facilities in the Merhabete district of Ethiopia’s Amhara region. Based on original fieldwork conducted 10 years after the project closed, I show that the project’s infrastructure significantly extended the regime’s presence in the district. However, these same structures also helped shape local ideas of the state, by exemplifying what a good mengist (government or state) might look like; this acted to weaken people’s acceptance of EPRDF rule. These findings inform our understanding of the relationship between aid and authoritarianism and demonstrate the need to consider development schemes’ long-term material legacies.","PeriodicalId":7508,"journal":{"name":"African Affairs","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143945695","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Soldiers in parliament: Military power and legislative authority in Uganda 议会中的士兵：乌干达的军事权力和立法权

IF 2.8 1区社会学

African Affairs Pub Date : 2025-03-08 DOI: 10.1093/afraf/adaf001

Gerald Bareebe, Christopher Day

引用次数: 0

‘A symbol of French colonialism’: The Brazza Memorial and contested colonial memory in Congo “法国殖民主义的象征”：Brazza纪念碑和刚果有争议的殖民记忆

IF 2.8 1区社会学

African Affairs Pub Date : 2025-03-06 DOI: 10.1093/afraf/adaf006

Moudwe Daga

{"title":"‘A symbol of French colonialism’: The Brazza Memorial and contested colonial memory in Congo","authors":"Moudwe Daga","doi":"10.1093/afraf/adaf006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adaf006","url":null,"abstract":"In 2006, the government of Congo built a $10 million glass and marble mausoleum to house the remains and to celebrate the legacies of the French colonizer, Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza. This extravagant commemoration sits uncomfortably alongside global calls for the removal of memorials celebrating colonial figures. This article analyses how ordinary people construct their own narratives to contest colonial commemorations through a study of citizens’ perceptions of the Savorgnan de Brazza Memorial in the Republic of Congo. The article interrogates the meanings of colonial commemoration in a postcolonial Francophone state with the intent to challenge the Western-centric tropes associated with the meanings of colonial memories. While in the West, the image of Savorgnan de Brazza remains associated with the tropes of the ‘White Savior’ and the ‘Good prophet’, for Congolese citizens, the colonial monument instead symbolizes French colonialism and its continued consequences. By recentring Congolese people and their perceptions of the mausoleum, this research uncovers an original account of Françafrique, or the acquaintances between French and African elites that render possible the continued influence of France in the state affairs of its previous colonies.","PeriodicalId":7508,"journal":{"name":"African Affairs","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2025-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143570371","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Rethinking ‘farmer–herder’ conflicts in the Ivorian internal frontier 重新思考科特迪瓦境内边境的“农牧民”冲突

IF 2.8 1区社会学

African Affairs Pub Date : 2025-01-11 DOI: 10.1093/afraf/adae027

Jeremy Allouche, Cyprien Yao Yao, Kando Soumahoro Amédée

引用次数: 0

The urbanization of conflict? Patterns of armed conflict and protest in Africa 冲突的城市化？非洲武装冲突和抗议的模式

IF 2.8 1区社会学

African Affairs Pub Date : 2024-11-05 DOI: 10.1093/afraf/adae025

Nick Dorward

引用次数: 0

Itinerary of a Christian Ex-Boko Haram bomb maker in Cameroon 喀麦隆一名前 "博科圣地 "炸弹制造者的行程安排