Eight of Africa's most distinguished scholars present reflections and cross-sectional analyses of the social, political and economic transformations in Africa since the end of the 1980s. The papers were presented at the 7th General Assembly of CODESRIA in Dakar; and the contributors have all been integral to the development and consolidation of CODESRIA's scientific pre-eminence. The papers monitor, identify and name the logic and dynamics of the current changes, and examination is made of the foundations of democratic discourses to determine their structuring. The contributors are Archie...

Ibrahim offers a comparative study of the democratic transitions in the Anglophone countries of West Africa, identifying regional trends and discreet factors. He argues that democracy is creeping up the agenda, owing to a detremined struggle for human rights and because democracy has been denied to the people for so long. He identifies a number of common issues across the region: the rise of a militarised secular state; a significant increase in public corruption; the primitive accumulation of capital; an intense battle to deepen democracy between civil society and the state; the...