States at Work explores the mundane practices of state-making in Africa by focussing on the daily functioning of public services and the practices of civil servants. Adopting mainly an ethnographic approach as a basis for theorizing, the authors deal with topics including: bureaucratic cultures and practical norms, operational routines in offices, career patterns and modes of appointment; how bureaucrats themselves perceive and deliver goods and services and interact with service users; the accumulation of public administration reforms and how the different bureaucratic corps react to...

Travelling Models offers a theoretical concept for comparative research on conflict management in Africa in processes of globalization: how is change in one place related to developments in other places? Why are certain issues that are important in one place taken up in other places, while others are not? The authors examine how the travel of models enact changes, particularly in African conflict situations, most often in unexpected ways. They look at what happens when a model has been put into practice at a conflict site, and they pay attention to the forms of social (re-)ordering...

Africa in Scotland, Scotland in Africa provides scholarly, interdisciplinary analysis of the historical and contemporary relationships, links and networks between Scotland, Africa and the African diaspora. The book interrogates these links from a variety of perspectives - historical, political, economic, religious, diplomatic, and cultural - and assesses the mutual implications for past, present and future relationships. The socio-historical connection between Scotland and Africa is illuminated by the many who have shaped the history of African nationalism, education, health, and art...

This book uses empirical research to bring together a broad range of protest contexts in twelve chapters. From the formation of Maroon societies in the early colonial period, to female mobilisation in authoritarian contexts, via urban youth culture, women or mineworkers in trade unionism, as well as pro- and anti- gay rights activists, the protagonists here all insist upon their rights to protest in a variety of ways. Sometimes popular protest is expressed through religion, often (and sometimes violently) by young people, exasperated by their long wait for social achievement. Electoral wars...

As South Africa has entered the third decade after the end of apartheid, this book aims at taking stock of the post-apartheid dynamics in the, so far, often less-comprehensively analysed, but crucial fields of APRM-relevant politics, social development, land and regional relations. In the first part of the book an analysis of some structuring domestic features of post-apartheid South Africa is provided, with a focus on political processes and debates around gender, HIV/AIDS and religion. The second part of the volume focuses on the land question and part three is looking at South Africa's...

The Making of the African Road offers an account of the long-distance road in Africa. Being a latecomer to automobility and far from saturated mass mobility, the African road continues to be open for diverging interpretations and creative appropriations. The road regime on the continent is thus still under construction, and it is made in more than one sense: physically, socially, politically, morally and cosmologically. The contributions to this volume provide first-hand anthropological insights into the infrastructural, economic, historical as well as experiential dimensions of the...

In Transfers of Belonging, Erdmute Alber traces the history of child fostering in northern Benin from the pre-colonial past to the present by pointing out the embeddedness of child foster practices and norms in a wider political process of change. Child fostering was, for a long time, not just one way of raising children, but seen as the appropriate way of doing so. This changed profoundly with the arrival of European ideas about birth parents being the ‘right’ parents, but also with the introduction of schooling and the differentiation of life chances. Besides providing deep historical...

The edited collection Spatial Practices: Territory, Border and Infrastructure in Africa presents research findings from the German Research Council’s Priority Programme 1448 “Adaptation and Change in Africa” (2011-2018). At the heart of the volume are important new spatial practices that have emerged after the end of the Cold War in the fields of conflict, climate change, migration and urban development, to name but a few, and their ordering effects with regard to social relations. These findings bear particular relevance for the co-production of territorialities and sovereignties, for...

Being a first of its kind, this volume comprises a multi-disciplinary exploration of Mozambique’s contemporary and historical dynamics, bringing together scholars from across the globe. Focusing on the country’s vibrant cultural, political, economic and social world – including the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial era – the book argues that Mozambique is a country still emergent, still unfolding, still on the move. Drawing on the disciplines of history, literature studies, anthropology, political science, economy and art history, the book serves not only as a generous...

African-Asian interactions contribute to the emergence of a decentred, multi-polar world in which different actors need to redefine themselves and their relations to each other. Afrasian Transformations explores these changes to map out several arenas where these transformations have already produced startling results: development politics, South-South cooperation, cultural memory, mobile lifeworlds and transcultural connectivity. The contributions in this volume neither celebrate these shifting dynamics as felicitous proof of a new age of South-South solidarity, nor do they debunk them as...