Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles) ISSN (Print) 0001-9909 - ISSN (Online) 1468-2621 Published by Oxford University Press[425 journals]
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Pages: 1 - 32 Abstract: ABSTRACTScholarship on the #BringBackOurGirls (#BBOG) movement mainly focuses on its success in generating global attention to the 2014 kidnapping of Nigeria’s Chibok girls. This paper focuses on an unintended consequence of the movement—the establishment of a social problem industry around the Chibok girls and their community. The paper draws on a dataset with over 160 interviewees and focus group discussion (FGD) participants, including 42 #BBOG activists. The findings demonstrate the interplay of contextually situated actors with particular values and interests engaged in claims-making regarding the Chibok girls. The #BBOG turned the Chibok kidnapping into a social problem in a sociological sense. In the process, the BBOG engaged in an ideational battlefield with three other entities. The paper contributes to the sociology of social problems by articulating weaknesses in social problem theory. This helps to suggest how to make social problems theory more applicable to developing world contexts. The paper’s approach avoids the unilinearism and determinism of existing theory. It argues that not all social problems are resolved in ways that are favourable to those affected. The exploitation of the Chibok girls and their community provides an example of the persistence of social problems: social problems are useful in appropriate hands. PubDate: Fri, 27 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/afraf/adac042 Issue No:Vol. 122, No. 486 (2023)
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Pages: 33 - 55 Abstract: ABSTRACTIn January 2004, residents of Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, were treated to a disturbing sight. Over 200 members of the governing Movement for Multiparty Democracy party marched through the streets of the capital carrying a mock coffin bearing the name of Roy Clarke, a prominent newspaper satirist and white British national who had been a permanent resident in the country since the early 1960s. The protesters accused Clarke of insulting and defaming President Levy Mwanawasa in his previous column and demanded his immediate deportation. The Minister of Home Affairs obliged, but the satirist successfully challenged his deportation in Zambia’s courts. Drawing from newspaper sources, court documents, and interviews with key informants, this article shows that these protests were anything but a spontaneous demonstration of public outrage. Instead, they had been carefully orchestrated by Mwanawasa and his close allies to bolster Mwanawasa’s beleaguered presidency. The article argues that deportation orders and racial nationalism against racial minorities are strategies adopted by political elites during periods of weakness, even when these ideas have little or no popular support. More broadly, we argue that the status of racial minorities and other foreigners in Zambia is often provisional, depending on political considerations. PubDate: Wed, 18 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/afraf/adac044 Issue No:Vol. 122, No. 486 (2023)
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Pages: 57 - 94 Abstract: ABSTRACTWhile current levels of economic inequality in Africa receive ample attention from academics and policymakers, we know little about the long-run evolution of inequality in the region. Even the new and influential ‘global inequality literature’ that is associated with scholars like Thomas Piketty, Branko Milanovic, and Walter Scheidel has had little to say about Africa so far. This paper is a first effort to fill that void. Building on recent research in African economic history and utilizing the new theoretical frameworks of the global inequality literature, we chart the long-run patterns and drivers of inequality in Africa from the slave trades to the present. Our analysis dismantles mainstream narratives about the colonial roots of persistent high inequality in post-colonial Africa and shows that existing inequality concepts and theories need further calibration to account, among others, for the role of African slavery in the long-run emergence and vanishing of inequality regimes. PubDate: Mon, 13 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/afraf/adad001 Issue No:Vol. 122, No. 486 (2023)
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Pages: 95 - 117 Abstract: One effect of Zimbabwe’s 2017 coup was to unleash a new wave of public engagement with the unresolved state repression of the 1980s, known as Gukurahundi. This wave was led by the ‘post-Gukurahundi generation’ and particularly by activists whose narratives of Gukurahundi were entwined with calls for a separate ‘Mthwakazi nation’. This article explores these activists’ stories of Gukurahundi and asks why they broke through into the public realm after decades of relative silence. It argues that Mthwakazi activists’ engagement relied on an interpretation of Gukurahundi not simply as a discrete historical event, but as the clearest expression of an ongoing ‘Grand Plan’ of ethnic marginalization. This narrative was foundational to the construction of a moral order that divided the country along ethnic and regional fault lines, ultimately legitimizing Mthwakazi nationalism. The paper roots this narrative’s emergence in two interrelated processes. Speaking to the role of silencing in keeping conflicts alive across generations, it examines how the ‘noisy silence’ that has surrounded Gukurahundi in both public and private has meant that Gukurahundi lingered as a readily available interpretative lens. This lens became meaningful when the second generation, faced with political and economic marginalization, was grappling for meaning and political belonging. PubDate: Thu, 09 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/afraf/adac043 Issue No:Vol. 122, No. 486 (2023)
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Pages: 119 - 145 Abstract: Since the 1980s, analyses of African political identities have emphasized identity manipulation as a governance tool. In the Somali Horn of Africa, however, politicians’ efforts to reinvent identities confront rigid understandings of genealogical clanship as a key component of identity and political mobilization. This article explores how government efforts to construct a new ‘Ethiopian–Somali’ identity within Ethiopia’s ethnic-federal system are entangled with attempts to reinterpret clan genealogies and histories. We focus on efforts to revise the history of clans within the broader Ogaden Somali clan group and trace the possibilities and limits of these revisions in relation to legacies of colonialism as well as popular understandings of Ogaden identity. Drawing on fieldwork and archival research, we show that political struggles over Somalis’ integration with Ethiopia orient around Somali clanship, but that clanship is not a mechanical tool of mobilization, as it is often portrayed. We suggest that genealogical relatedness does not equate to political loyalty, but genealogical discourse provides a framework by which various actors reinterpret contemporary events by collapsing history into the present to imbue clan, ethnic, and national identities with political significance. PubDate: Sat, 04 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/afraf/adad003 Issue No:Vol. 122, No. 486 (2023)
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Pages: 147 - 166 Abstract: ABSTRACTThis research explores a classic predicament of authoritarian leaders—the need for a strong security force to deter opposition alongside a fear of the threats that a strong force could pose. By providing a unique view into the security services in The Gambia under President Jammeh (1994–2017), it argues that fostering uncertainty was the key tool in maintaining control of the armed forces. It situates this approach in the context of wider theories of institutional arbitrariness. The research demonstrates how unpredictability was operationalized through multiple, overlapping practices targeting both the structural level and routine aspects of military life. It also looks at international opportunities as an avenue to mitigate some of the negative effects of pervasive uncertainty in the forces. The research provides new insights into the internal dynamics of state security forces by drawing on data newly available after The Gambia’s democratic political transition of 2017. This includes interviews with members of the forces, testimonies from the Truth, Reconciliation, and Reparation Commission (TRRC), court martial transcripts, and other government reports. PubDate: Thu, 09 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/afraf/adad002 Issue No:Vol. 122, No. 486 (2023)
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Pages: 167 - 169 Abstract: The Wealth and Poverty of African States: Economic Growth, Living Standards and Taxation Since the Late Nineteenth Century by Morten Jerven, Cambridge University Press, 2022. 198 pp. $74.99 (hardcover). ISBN 9781108341080. PubDate: Wed, 28 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/afraf/adac037 Issue No:Vol. 122, No. 486 (2022)
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Pages: 171 - 173 Abstract: Inside mining capitalism: The micropolitics of work on the Congolese and Zambian Copperbelts, by RubbersBenjamin. Woodbridge: James Currey, 2021. xiv + 186 pp. $29.95 (paperback), $24.95 (e-book). ISBN 978 1 84701 286 9 and eISBN 978 1 80010 319 1. PubDate: Fri, 16 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/afraf/adac039 Issue No:Vol. 122, No. 486 (2022)
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Pages: 175 - 177 Abstract: Imperialism and development: The East African Groundnut Scheme and its legacy, by WestcottNicholas. Boydell and Brewer, Woodbridge, 2020. 260 pp. $25.95 (paper back). ISBN 9781847013453. PubDate: Wed, 28 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/afraf/adac038 Issue No:Vol. 122, No. 486 (2022)
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Pages: 179 - 181 Abstract: Shaping the future of power: Knowledge production and network-building in China–Africa relations, by BenabdallahLina. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. 191 pp. $80.00 (cloth), $29.95 (paper). ISBN 978-0-472-07454-9 (cloth) and ISBN 978-0-472-05454-1 (paper). PubDate: Fri, 16 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/afraf/adac041 Issue No:Vol. 122, No. 486 (2022)
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Pages: 183 - 184 Abstract: China and Africa: The new era, by LargeDaniel. Cambridge: Polity, 2021. xix + 270 pp. £50.00 (hardback), £15.99 (paperback), £11.99 (eBook). ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3632-0, ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3633-7 and ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3634-4. PubDate: Fri, 16 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/afraf/adac040 Issue No:Vol. 122, No. 486 (2022)
Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles)
[425 journals]
