African Political Systems Revisited

African Political Systems Revisited
Author: Aleksandar Bošković
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2022-04-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1800734735

Reexamining a classical work of social anthropology, African Political Systems (1940), edited by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, this book looks at the colonial and academic context from which the work arose, as well as its reception and its subject matter, and looks at how the work can help with analysis of current politics in Africa. This book critically reflects upon the history of anthropology. It also contributes to a political anthropology which is aware of its antecedents, self-reflexive as a discipline, conscious of pitfalls and biases, and able to locate itself in its academic, social and political environment.

Social Im/mobilities in Africa

Social Im/mobilities in Africa
Author: Joël Noret
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2019-11-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1805393979

Grounded in both theory and ethnography, this volume insists on taking social positionality seriously when accounting for Africa’s current age of polarizing wealth. To this end, the book advocates a multidimensional view of African societies, in which social positions consist of a variety of intersecting social powers - or ‘capitals’ – including wealth, education, social relationships, religion, ethnicity, and others. Accordingly, the notion of social im/mobilities emphasizes the complexities of current changes, taking us beyond the prism of a one-dimensional social ladder, for social moves cannot always be apprehended through the binaries of ‘gains’ and ‘losses’.

Property and Political Order in Africa

Property and Political Order in Africa
Author: Catherine Boone
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 439
Release: 2014-02-10
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1107040698

In sub-Saharan Africa, property relationships around land and access to natural resources vary across localities, districts, and farming regions. These differences produce patterned variations in relationships between individuals, communities, and the state. This book captures these patterns in an analysis of structure and variation in rural land tenure regimes. In most farming areas, state authority is deeply embedded in land regimes, drawing farmers, ethnic insiders and outsiders, lineages, villages, and communities into direct and indirect relationships with political authorities at different levels of the state apparatus. The analysis shows how property institutions - institutions that define political authority and hierarchy around land - shape dynamics of great interest to scholars of politics, including the dynamics of land-related competition and conflict, territorial conflict, patron-client relations, electoral cleavage and mobilization, ethnic politics, rural rebellion, and the localization and "nationalization" of political competition.

African Civilization Revisited

African Civilization Revisited
Author: Basil Davidson
Publisher: Africa Research and Publications
Total Pages: 484
Release: 1991
Genre: History
ISBN:

A classic book on African history as told in the chronicles and records of chiefs and kings, travellers and merchant-adventurers, poets and pirates and priests, soldiers and scholars. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Democracy in Africa

Democracy in Africa
Author: Nic Cheeseman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2015-05-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316239489

This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the history of democracy in Africa and explains why the continent's democratic experiments have so often failed, as well as how they could succeed. Nic Cheeseman grapples with some of the most important questions facing Africa and democracy today, including whether international actors should try and promote democracy abroad, how to design political systems that manage ethnic diversity, and why democratic governments often make bad policy decisions. Beginning in the colonial period with the introduction of multi-party elections and ending in 2013 with the collapse of democracy in Mali and South Sudan, the book describes the rise of authoritarian states in the 1970s; the attempts of trade unions and some religious groups to check the abuse of power in the 1980s; the remarkable return of multiparty politics in the 1990s; and finally, the tragic tendency for elections to exacerbate corruption and violence.

Tertiary Institutional Transformation Revisited

Tertiary Institutional Transformation Revisited
Author: Sipho Seepe
Publisher:
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2020
Genre: Afrocentrism
ISBN: 9780639817682

"The challenges which face South African Higher Education are both topically diverse and historically marked by the legacies of its colonial and apartheid past. Transcending these conditions in order to reach emancipatory, inclusive and developmentally apt solutions will continue to test our creative and intellectual expertise, ingenuity and judgement. This book is an important contribution in this process. Towards the end of the last century, in the immediate wake of the post-apartheid era, a cohort of concerned and exceptional South African scholars brought their minds to bear on the challenges facing higher education in the country. Their ruminations resulted in an incisive volume; Black Perspective(s) in Tertiary Institutional Transformation (1998), edited by Sipho Seepe. Almost a quarter of a century later, this same cohort, with a few additions and subtractions, have revisited the terrain with penetrating insights and revealing historical hindsight. This book, Tertiary Institutional Transformation in South Africa Revisited (2020), is the result of their trenchant endeavours. This text has therefore enormous historical significance, now and for the future. It marks indelible milestones in the thinking about higher education in South Africa and throws up diachronic and synchronic issues, by some of its prominent and best minds."--

The Origin of the State

The Origin of the State
Author: Robert Harry Lowie
Publisher:
Total Pages: 136
Release: 1927
Genre: Prehistoric peoples
ISBN:

An enlarged and revised version of articles first published in the Freeman, July 19 and 26, 1922--cf. Preface.

Imagining Home

Imagining Home
Author: Sidney J. Lemelle
Publisher: Verso
Total Pages: 388
Release: 1994-12-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780860915850

This collection of original essays brilliantly interrogates the often ambivalent place of Africa in the imaginations, cultures and politics of its “New World” descendants. Combining literary analysis, history, biography, cultural studies, critical theory and politics, Imagining Home offers a fresh and creative approach to the history of Pan-Africanism and diasporic movements. A critical part of the book’s overall project is an examination of the legal, educational and political institutions and structures of domination over Africa and the African diaspora. Class and gender are placed at center stage alongside race in the exploration of how the discourses and practices of Pan-Africanism have been shaped. Other issues raised include the myriad ways in which grassroots religious and cultural movements informed Pan-Africanist political organizations; the role of African, African-American and Caribbean intellectuals in the formation of Pan-African thought—including W.E.B. DuBois, C.L.R. James and Adelaide Casely Hayford; the historical, ideological and institutional connections between African-Americans and South Africans; and the problems and prospects of Pan-Africanism as an emancipatory strategy for black people throughout the Atlantic.

Why Do Elections Matter in Africa?

Why Do Elections Matter in Africa?
Author: Nic Cheeseman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2021-02-18
Genre: Law
ISBN: 110841723X

A radical new approach to understanding Africa's elections: explaining why politicians, bureaucrats and voters so frequently break electoral rules.