Kategoria BISAC: History >> Africa - West

This volume investigates the interaction of a variety of actors and institutions involved in the provision of peace, security and justice in volatile environments.

It aims to take current debates about peacebuilding and statebuilding, the formation of political community, and the foundations of security and social order in conflict-affected or fragile environments further and deeper, by drawing on field research from West Africa and Oceania, but also through theoretical critique and engagement. The key debates in peacebuilding and statebuilding relate to concepts, practices and...

By featuring the life histories of eight senior men, Making Men in Ghana explores the changing meaning of becoming a man in modern Africa. Stephan F. Miescher concentrates on the ideals and expectations that formed around men who were prominent in their communities when Ghana became an independent nation. Miescher shows how they negotiated complex social and economic transformations and how they dealt with their mounting obligations and responsibilities as leaders in their kinship groups, churches, and schools. Not only were notions about men and masculinity shaped by community standards,...

"Provides important insider information concerning Sierra Leone's recent war... and builds on the author's] established reputation as an insightful and courageous journalist." --William Reno, Northwestern University

A Dirty War in West Africa recounts Lansana Gberie's harrowing experiences as a journalist during the decade-long civil war in Sierra Leone. Since 1991, this West African nation has been brought to its knees by a series of coups, violent conflicts, and finally, outright war. The war has ended today, but it is clear that things are hardly settled. Focusing on the group...

"The book is a readable, terse, theoretically developed treatment of an important episode in African history." --Journal of African History

"It is original and authoritative, certainly the best book we have on the heritage of Umar's conquests." --African History

..". lucid analysis of a changing jihad society. This study enlarges understanding not only of the Umarian empire but also of the jihad movements generally." --Choice

John Hanson's thoroughly researched study revises late-19th-century colonialist assumptions about a West African Muslim social movement. Using...

"Highly educative "Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana" brings early post-colonial Ghanaian politics full circle, the way it ought to be. Indeed, it is most appropriate that the Doyen of the Ghanaian independence movement should get this treatment at a time when the Danquah-Busia tradition is on the ascendancy in Ghana."
-Roger Gocking, historian, Mercy College, Dobbs Ferry, New York, author of "The History of Ghana" and "Facing Two Ways: Ghana's Coastal Communities Under Colonial Rule."

Like stars, societies are born, and this story deals with such a birth. It asks a fundamental and compelling question: How did societies first coalesce from the small foraging communities that had roamed in West Central Africa for many thousands of years?

Jan Vansina continues a career-long effort to reconstruct the history of African societies before European contact in How Societies Are Born. In this complement to his previous study Paths in the Rainforests, Vansina employs a provocative combination of archaeology and historical linguistics to turn his scholarly...

Liberia has been one of Africa's most violent trouble spots. In 1990, when thousands of teenage fighters, including young men wearing women's clothing and bizarre objects of decoration, laid siege to the capital, the world took notice. Since then Liberia has been through devastating civil upheaval. What began as a civil conflict, has spread to other West African nations.

Eschewing popular stereotypes and simple explanations, Stephen Ellis traces the history of the civil war that has blighted Liberia in recent years and looks at its political, ethnic and cultural roots. He focuses on...

A series of transformations, reforms, and attempted abolitions of slavery form a core narrative of nineteenth-century coastal West Africa. As the region's role in Atlantic commercial networks underwent a gradual transition from principally that of slave exporter to producer of "legitimate goods" and dependent markets, institutions of slavery became battlegrounds in which European abolitionism, pragmatic colonialism, and indigenous agency clashed.

In Slavery and Reform in West Africa, Trevor Getz demonstrates that it was largely on the anvil of this issue that French and...

A series of transformations, reforms, and attempted abolitions of slavery form a core narrative of nineteenth-century coastal West Africa. As the region's role in Atlantic commercial networks underwent a gradual transition from principally that of slave exporter to producer of "legitimate goods" and dependent markets, institutions of slavery became battlegrounds in which European abolitionism, pragmatic colonialism, and indigenous agency clashed.In Slavery and Reform in West Africa, Trevor Getz demonstrates that it was largely on the anvil of this issue that French and British policy in...

The contents of the book comprise an introduction and thirteen chapters divided into three parts. Each chapter provides an overview of existing literature on major topics, as well as a short list of recommended reading, and breaks new ground through the incorporation of original research. The...