Images of war, narratives of suffering and notions of ethnicity are intrinsically linked to Western perceptions of Africa. Filtered through a mostly international media the information of African wars is confined to narrow categories of explanation emerging from and adapted to a Western history and political culture. This book aims at reversing this process; to look at war and suffering from the point of view of those who fight it and suffer through it. In doing so it reveals that the simplistic models explaining contemporary wars in Africa which are reproduced in a Western discourse are...

State borders are more than barriers. They structure social, economic and political spaces and as such provide opportunities as well as obstacles for the communities straddling both sides of the border. This book deals with the conduits and opportunities of state borders in the Horn of Africa, and investigates how the people living there exploit state borders through various strategies. Using a micro level perspective, the case studies, which include the Horn and Eastern Africa, particularly the borders of Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, focus on...

After a long process of peace negotiations the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was signed on 9 January 2005 between the Government of Sudan (GOS) and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A). The CPA raised initial hopes that it would be the foundation block for lasting peace in Sudan. This book compiles scholarly analyses of the implementation of the power sharing agreement of the CPA, of ongoing conflicts with particular respect to land issues, of the challenges of the reintegration of internally displaced people and refugees, and of the repercussions of the CPA in other...

The conflict in the Nuba Mountains in central Sudan illustrates how state policies concerning the control of land can cause local conflicts to escalate into large scale wars, which become increasingly difficult to manage or resolve.

This book explores cannibalism, food, eating and being eaten in its many variations. It deals with people who feel threatened by cannibals, churches who combat cannibals and anthropologists who find themselves suspected of being cannibals. It describes how different African and European images of the cannibal intersected and influenced each other in Tooro, Western Uganda, where the figure of the resurrecting cannibal draws on both pre-Christian ideas and church dogma of the bodily resurrection and the ritual of Holy Communion. In Tooro cannibals are witches: they bewitch people so that they...

Focuses on pastoralism, politics, policies and development in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia. It is based on anthropological field research over a period of thirty-four years and attempts a synthesis of historical findings and political anthropology, including studies carried out from a perspective of development intervention. Presenting a detailed ethnographic view of recent events of ethnic violence in Kenya, the authors analyse how local patterns of conflict among pastoralists were influenced by both national and regional politics, which have encouraged an increased tendency of...

A study of the longue duree of a marginalized part of northern Kenya, examining the process of territorialization and the role of Islam in politicizing ethnicity.

The Greater Horn of Africa (GHA) is engulfed by three interrelated crises: various inter-state wars, civil wars, and inter-communal conflicts; an economic crisis manifested in widespread debilitating poverty, chronic food insecurity and famines; and environmental degradation that is ravaging the region. While it is apparent that the countries of the region are unlikely to be able to deal with the crises individually, there is consensus that their chances of doing so improve markedly with collective regional action. The contributors to this volume address the need for regional integration in...

In the second half of the 1960s and the early 1970s, the Ethiopian student movement emerged from rather innocuous beginnings to become the major opposition force against the imperial regime in Ethiopia, contributing perhaps more than any other factor to the eruption of the 1974 revolution, a revolution that brought about not only the end of the long reign of Emperor Haile Sellassie, but also a dynasty of exceptional longevity. The student movement would be of fundamental importance in the shaping of the future Ethiopia, instrumental in both its political and social development. Bahru Zewde,...

-Nowhere has a range of case studies of Sudan been brought together in a single volume. Given the concern with the growing number and complexity of conflicts in Sudan and South Sudan there is a significant readership in academic circles and from those involved in humanitarian organisations of all kinds.- Professor Peter Woodward, University of Reading -A timely contribution to an important set of debates ... tackles questions emerging from discussions about modernisation, urbanisation and globalisation from an explicitly local angle with regards to Sudan.- Dr Harry Verhoeven, University of...