Coping with Crisis in African States

Coping with Crisis in African States
Author: Peter Lewis
Publisher:
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2016
Genre: Crisis management in government
ISBN: 9781626372290

¿Provides a lucid approach to assessing the factors that create vulnerabilities, or possibilities for resilience, in the face of crisis ... complemented by rich empirical country chapters and clear policy recommendations.¿ ¿Rachel Beatty Riedl, Northwestern University Although large-scale conflicts, political upheavals, and social violence are common problems throughout Africa, individual countries vary greatly in both their susceptibility to these crises and their capacities for responding effectively. What accounts for this variance? How do crises emerge, and how are they resolved? When are unexpected events most likely to spiral into crisis? Are there institutions and policies that can help to manage adverse shocks? The authors of Coping with Crisis in African States assess the capability for crisis management in countries across the continent, shedding new light on the sources of instability in the region, as well as on comparative questions of state capacity and resilience. Peter M. Lewis is associate professor and director of the African Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University¿s School of Advanced International Studies. John W. Harbeson is emeritus professor of political science at the City University of New York Graduate Center and the City College of New York.

Beyond State Crisis?

Beyond State Crisis?
Author: Mark Beissinger
Publisher: Woodrow Wilson Center Press
Total Pages: 538
Release: 2002-01-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781930365087

The contributors not only study state breakdown but compare the consequences of post-communism with those of post-colonialism.

Democracy, Good Governance and Development in Africa

Democracy, Good Governance and Development in Africa
Author: Mawere, Munyaradzi
Publisher: Langaa RPCIG
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2015-10-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9956763004

Questions surrounding democracy, governance, and development especially in the view of Africa have provoked acrimonious debates in the past few years. It remains a perennial question why some decades after political independence in Africa the continent continues experiencing bad governance, lagging behind socioeconomically, and its democracy questionable. We admit that a plethora of theories and reasons, including iniquitous and malicious ones, have been conjured in an attempt to explain and answer the questions as to why Africa seems to be lagging behind other continents in issues pertaining to good governance, democracy and socio-economic development. Yet, none of the theories and reasons proffered so far seems to have provided enduring solutions to Africa’s diverse complex problems and predicaments. This book dissects and critically examines the matrix of Africa’s multifaceted problems on governance, democracy and development in an attempt to proffer enduring solutions to the continent’s long-standing political and socio-economic dilemmas and setbacks.

Disrupting Africa

Disrupting Africa
Author: Olufunmilayo B. Arewa
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 665
Release: 2021-07-29
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1009064223

In the digital era, many African countries sit at the crossroads of a potential future that will be shaped by digital-era technologies with existing laws and institutions constructed under conditions of colonial and post-colonial authoritarian rule. In Disrupting Africa, Olufunmilayo B. Arewa examines this intersection and shows how it encompasses existing and new zones of contestation based on ethnicity, religion, region, age, and other sources of division. Arewa highlights specific collisions between the old and the new, including in the 2020 #EndSARS protests in Nigeria, which involved young people engaging with varied digital era technologies who provoked a violent response from rulers threatened by the prospect of political change. In this groundbreaking work, Arewa demonstrates how lawmaking and legal processes during and after colonialism continue to frame contexts in which digital technologies are created, implemented, regulated, and used in Africa today.

Survival Migration

Survival Migration
Author: Alexander Betts
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2013-08-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0801468957

International treaties, conventions, and organizations to protect refugees were established in the aftermath of World War II to protect people escaping targeted persecution by their own governments. However, the nature of cross-border displacement has transformed dramatically since then. Such threats as environmental change, food insecurity, and generalized violence force massive numbers of people to flee states that are unable or unwilling to ensure their basic rights, as do conditions in failed and fragile states that make possible human rights deprivations. Because these reasons do not meet the legal understanding of persecution, the victims of these circumstances are not usually recognized as "refugees," preventing current institutions from ensuring their protection.In this book, Alexander Betts develops the concept of "survival migration" to highlight the crisis in which these people find themselves. Examining flight from three of the most fragile states in Africa—Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Somalia—Betts explains variation in institutional responses across the neighboring host states. There is massive inconsistency. Some survival migrants are offered asylum as refugees; others are rounded up, detained, and deported, often in brutal conditions. The inadequacies of the current refugee regime are a disaster for human rights and gravely threaten international security. In Survival Migration, Betts outlines these failings, illustrates the enormous human suffering that results, and argues strongly for an expansion of protected categories.

Covid-19 and Governance

Covid-19 and Governance
Author: Jan Nederveen Pieterse
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2021-06-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000395294

Covid-19 and Governance focuses on the relationship between governance institutions and approaches to Covid-19 and health outcomes. Bringing together analyses of Covid-19 developments in countries and regions across the world with a wide-angle lens on governance, this volume asks: what works, what hasn’t and isn’t, and why? Organized by region, the book is structured to follow the spread of Covid-19 in the course of 2020, through Asia, the Middle East, Europe, the Americas, and Africa. The analyses explore a number of key themes, including public health systems, government capability, and trust in government—as well as underlying variables of social cohesion and inequality. This volume combines governance, policies, and politics to bring wide international scope and analytical depth to the study of the Covid-19 pandemic. Together the authors represent a diverse and formidable database of experience and understanding. They include sociologists, anthropologists, scholars of development studies and public administration, as well as MD specialists in public health and epidemiology. Engaged and free of jargon, this book speaks to a wide global public—including scholars, students, and policymakers—on a topic that has profound and broad appeal.

Our Continent, Our Future

Our Continent, Our Future
Author: P. Thandika Mkandawire
Publisher: IDRC
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2014-05-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 155250204X

Our Continent, Our Future presents the emerging African perspective on this complex issue. The authors use as background their own extensive experience and a collection of 30 individual studies, 25 of which were from African economists, to summarize this African perspective and articulate a path for the future. They underscore the need to be sensitive to each country's unique history and current condition. They argue for a broader policy agenda and for a much more active role for the state within what is largely a market economy. Finally, they stress that Africa must, and can, compete in an increasingly globalized world and, perhaps most importantly, that Africans must assume the leading role in defining the continent's development agenda.

State Legitimacy and Development in Africa

State Legitimacy and Development in Africa
Author: Pierre Englebert
Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2000
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781588261311

Englebert argues that differences in economic performance both within Africa and across the developing world can be linked to differences in historical state legitimacy.

Challenging the State

Challenging the State
Author: Merilee S. Grindle
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 1996-02-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780521559195

The 1980s and 1990s posed great challenges to governments in Latin America and Africa. Deep economic crises and significantly heightened pressure for political reform severely taxed their capacity to manage economic and political tasks. These crises pointed to an intense need to reform the state and redefine its relationship to the market and civic society. This book examines the paradox of states that have been weakened by crisis just as their capacity to encourage economic development and provide for effective governance most needs to be strengthened. Case studies of Mexico and Kenya allow the author to analyse the opportunities available for political leadership in moments of crisis, and the constraints on action provided by leadership goals and existing political and economic structures. She argues that while leaders and political structures are often part of the problem, they can also be part of the solution in building more efficient, effective, and responsive states.

Challenges to the Nation-state in Africa

Challenges to the Nation-state in Africa
Author: Adebayo O. Olukoshi
Publisher: Nordic Africa Institute
Total Pages: 222
Release: 1996
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

The challenges facing the nation-state in contemporary Africa are increasingly attracting the attention of scholars interested to understand how the decomposition and recomposition of popular political identities on the continent are affecting the post-colonial unitary project. The studies presented in this volume show that the challenges to the post-colonial nation-state project in Africa have mainly taken ethno-regionalist, religious and separatist forms. These challenges have been shaped by the long drawn-out economic crisis, zero-sum, market-led structural adjustment, and the legacy of decades of political authoritarianism and exclusion that dates from the colonial period. The contributors to this book present different suggestions to promote national unity and a supporting civic identity in Africa.