Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1017/s0022278x22000118
{"title":"MOA volume 60 issue 1 Cover and Back matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s0022278x22000118","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0022278x22000118","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47608,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46096310","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1017/S0022278X21000355
Jens Herpolsheimer
during the Benghazi agreement, only to turn around and blame the rebels for breaking the terms of the agreement, thus leaving France with no choice but to mount Operation Tacaud in . Powell’s argument is rich in anecdotes, such as the story of the French ambassador who kept an undated and signed letter from President Tombalbaye so that he could post it to his superiors in case Tombalbaye was under immediate threat and unable to request military assistance himself. Or how President Goukouni Weddeye had once stayed awake all night with his Kalashnikov, fearing that the French had staged a coup against him. The story turned out to be a false alarm sent by Chadian soldiers who had misapprehended French military movements at the capital’s airport on that night. However, for a book concerned with France’s intervention and its impact on state formation in Chad, it is surprising that Powell does not provide any account of the connection between the colonial and the post-colonial, even more so because of the decades under study. An exploration of decolonisation in Chad would have set the stage for readers unfamiliar with Chadian politics to first understand Chad’s dependence on external military support and, second, the preponderant role of France in its domestic politics.
{"title":"Undoing Coups: the African Union and post-coup intervention in Madagascar by Antonia Witt London: Zed Books, 2020. Pp. 296. $95 (hbk).","authors":"Jens Herpolsheimer","doi":"10.1017/S0022278X21000355","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022278X21000355","url":null,"abstract":"during the Benghazi agreement, only to turn around and blame the rebels for breaking the terms of the agreement, thus leaving France with no choice but to mount Operation Tacaud in . Powell’s argument is rich in anecdotes, such as the story of the French ambassador who kept an undated and signed letter from President Tombalbaye so that he could post it to his superiors in case Tombalbaye was under immediate threat and unable to request military assistance himself. Or how President Goukouni Weddeye had once stayed awake all night with his Kalashnikov, fearing that the French had staged a coup against him. The story turned out to be a false alarm sent by Chadian soldiers who had misapprehended French military movements at the capital’s airport on that night. However, for a book concerned with France’s intervention and its impact on state formation in Chad, it is surprising that Powell does not provide any account of the connection between the colonial and the post-colonial, even more so because of the decades under study. An exploration of decolonisation in Chad would have set the stage for readers unfamiliar with Chadian politics to first understand Chad’s dependence on external military support and, second, the preponderant role of France in its domestic politics.","PeriodicalId":47608,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43720258","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1017/S0022278X21000446
Tim Zajontz
Abstract As infrastructure development has become a key ingredient in Africa–China relations, the role of African governments in co-determining the design, funding and governance of the continent's infrastructures has come under close scrutiny. This article sheds light on the rehabilitation of a symbol of Sino–African friendship: the Tanzania–Zambia Railway Authority (TAZARA). Employing Jessop's strategic-relational approach, it is shown that the strategies of the shareholding governments in the negotiations with a Chinese consortium were informed by strategic learning from previous railway privatisations, corresponding cost–benefit analyses and reflection about Chinese commercial interests. Zambia's indebtedness and Tanzania's autocratic developmental state under President Magufuli formed crucial elements of the structural context in which the fate of Africa's Freedom Railway was negotiated. The article transcends both crudely structuralist accounts of a supposedly all-powerful China and voluntarist conceptions of African agency that are void of structure. Assessing (African) agency requires analytical sensitivity towards the dialectical interaction between specific strategic capacities and strategically selective political–economic contexts.
{"title":"‘Win-win’ contested: negotiating the privatisation of Africa's Freedom Railway with the ‘Chinese of today’","authors":"Tim Zajontz","doi":"10.1017/S0022278X21000446","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022278X21000446","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract As infrastructure development has become a key ingredient in Africa–China relations, the role of African governments in co-determining the design, funding and governance of the continent's infrastructures has come under close scrutiny. This article sheds light on the rehabilitation of a symbol of Sino–African friendship: the Tanzania–Zambia Railway Authority (TAZARA). Employing Jessop's strategic-relational approach, it is shown that the strategies of the shareholding governments in the negotiations with a Chinese consortium were informed by strategic learning from previous railway privatisations, corresponding cost–benefit analyses and reflection about Chinese commercial interests. Zambia's indebtedness and Tanzania's autocratic developmental state under President Magufuli formed crucial elements of the structural context in which the fate of Africa's Freedom Railway was negotiated. The article transcends both crudely structuralist accounts of a supposedly all-powerful China and voluntarist conceptions of African agency that are void of structure. Assessing (African) agency requires analytical sensitivity towards the dialectical interaction between specific strategic capacities and strategically selective political–economic contexts.","PeriodicalId":47608,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44960166","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1017/s0022278x22000106
{"title":"MOA volume 60 issue 1 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s0022278x22000106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0022278x22000106","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47608,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56760658","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1017/s0022278x21000343
Moudwe Daga
{"title":"France's Wars in Chad: military intervention and decolonization in Africa by Nathaniel K. Powell Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 336. $99.99 (hbk).","authors":"Moudwe Daga","doi":"10.1017/s0022278x21000343","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0022278x21000343","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47608,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45715337","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1017/S0022278X21000410
Kieran Mitton
Abstract Within two decades, Sierra Leone's ‘cliques’ have transformed from peripheral social clubs to warring Crips, Bloods, and Black street gangs at the heart of criminal and political violence. Nevertheless, they remain severely under-studied, with scholarship on Sierra Leonean youth marginality heavily focused on ex-combatants. Drawing on extended fieldwork with Freetown's cliques as they played the ‘game’ – the daily hustle to survive and resist the ‘system’ – this article offers two main contributions. First, it addresses the knowledge gap by charting the origins, evolution and contemporary organisation of these new urban players. Second, it argues that although this history reveals continuity in perennial forms of youth marginalisation, it also shows that the game itself has changed. Cycles of escalating violence and growth are hardwired into this new game. Exacerbated by a political system that sustains and exploits them, cliques present a far greater challenge to everyday peace than has hitherto been recognised.
{"title":"‘A Game of Pain’: youth marginalisation and the gangs of Freetown","authors":"Kieran Mitton","doi":"10.1017/S0022278X21000410","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022278X21000410","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Within two decades, Sierra Leone's ‘cliques’ have transformed from peripheral social clubs to warring Crips, Bloods, and Black street gangs at the heart of criminal and political violence. Nevertheless, they remain severely under-studied, with scholarship on Sierra Leonean youth marginality heavily focused on ex-combatants. Drawing on extended fieldwork with Freetown's cliques as they played the ‘game’ – the daily hustle to survive and resist the ‘system’ – this article offers two main contributions. First, it addresses the knowledge gap by charting the origins, evolution and contemporary organisation of these new urban players. Second, it argues that although this history reveals continuity in perennial forms of youth marginalisation, it also shows that the game itself has changed. Cycles of escalating violence and growth are hardwired into this new game. Exacerbated by a political system that sustains and exploits them, cliques present a far greater challenge to everyday peace than has hitherto been recognised.","PeriodicalId":47608,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41575587","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1017/s0022278x21000380
M. Langan
{"title":"Kwame Nkrumah: visions of liberation by Jeffrey S. Ahlman Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2021. Pp. 240. $16.95 (pbk).","authors":"M. Langan","doi":"10.1017/s0022278x21000380","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0022278x21000380","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47608,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47453060","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1017/S0022278X21000434
L. Carruth, Lahra Smith
Abstract This study uses ethnography along Ethiopian women's irregular migration routes through Djibouti to analyse the complex reasons women leave home to seek labour opportunities in the Gulf States. Theories and policies that either narrowly depict women's motivations as economic in nature or focus only on women's needs for security and protection, fail to account both for the politics of seeking employment abroad, and the ways migration provides women a potential refuge from various forms of violence at home. Using a feminist analysis, we argue that women do not migrate only for financial opportunities, but also to escape combinations of domestic, political and structural violence. As such, irregular migration both evinces a failure of asylum systems and humanitarian organisations to protect Ethiopians, and a failure of the state to provide Ethiopian women meaningful citizenship. Lacking both protection and meaningful citizenship, international migration represents women's journeys for opportunity and emancipation.
{"title":"Building one's own house: power and escape for Ethiopian women through international migration","authors":"L. Carruth, Lahra Smith","doi":"10.1017/S0022278X21000434","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022278X21000434","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This study uses ethnography along Ethiopian women's irregular migration routes through Djibouti to analyse the complex reasons women leave home to seek labour opportunities in the Gulf States. Theories and policies that either narrowly depict women's motivations as economic in nature or focus only on women's needs for security and protection, fail to account both for the politics of seeking employment abroad, and the ways migration provides women a potential refuge from various forms of violence at home. Using a feminist analysis, we argue that women do not migrate only for financial opportunities, but also to escape combinations of domestic, political and structural violence. As such, irregular migration both evinces a failure of asylum systems and humanitarian organisations to protect Ethiopians, and a failure of the state to provide Ethiopian women meaningful citizenship. Lacking both protection and meaningful citizenship, international migration represents women's journeys for opportunity and emancipation.","PeriodicalId":47608,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42032201","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1017/S0022278X21000367
J. Saalfeld
setting of multiple, inter-related regional and international actors, such as the Southern African Development Community, the International Organization of the Francophonie, the Indian Ocean Commission, different UN agencies and Western states. Over the course of eight chapters, Witt makes a dedicated effort to identify (African) ROs as ‘sites’ where knowledge regimes are produced and disseminated, and interventions as moments during which these knowledge regimes are enacted, but also contested, in processes of transnational ordermaking (discussed in Chapter ). Following these methodological and theoretical considerations, the book offers a very thorough and extremely well-narrated account of the historical emergence and contested making of what Witt calls the ‘African anti-coup norm’, identifying and analysing actors, changing discourses and concerns. It convincingly demonstrates a strategic de-politicisation, to the detriment of more substantial provisions regarding ‘human rights’, leading to a seemingly inevitable strengthening and legitimation of the AU, even if continuously contested by other regional and international actors (see Chapter ). Subsequent chapters offer a close reading of the historical, socioeconomic and political context of the complexMalagasy crisis (re)emerging in (Chapter ), and present the intervention scenario (Chapter ) as well as the intervention logic (Chapter ). In these, although they are at times a bit lengthy and repetitive, Witt provides an empirically rich and analytically compelling account of the key actors, their different problem perceptions and solutions suggested, as well as the specific forms that they gave to their interventions and the complex often competitive interactions among them. Finally, she links these elaborations back to the book’s main argument, discussing actual ordering effects both on Madagascar and internationally more generally (Chapter ), and pointing to larger patterns of conflict intervention in Africa, beyond Madagascar, that have resulted in similar outcomes (Chapter ). On a critical note, some key terms, such as ‘space’, ‘practice’, as well as ‘order’ itself, would have been worth developing more conceptually and with more precision. Moreover, reference to different intervening actors, across Chapters , and , could have been more systematic, to make it easier to keep track of who did what, when and how this related to efforts employed by other actors. However, these are only minor issues in an otherwise entirely fascinating book that makes a valuable contribution to both African peace and security research and (global) IR.
{"title":"Salafism and Political Order in Africa by Sebastian Elischer Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 322. $89.99 (hbk) $29.99 (pbk).","authors":"J. Saalfeld","doi":"10.1017/S0022278X21000367","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022278X21000367","url":null,"abstract":"setting of multiple, inter-related regional and international actors, such as the Southern African Development Community, the International Organization of the Francophonie, the Indian Ocean Commission, different UN agencies and Western states. Over the course of eight chapters, Witt makes a dedicated effort to identify (African) ROs as ‘sites’ where knowledge regimes are produced and disseminated, and interventions as moments during which these knowledge regimes are enacted, but also contested, in processes of transnational ordermaking (discussed in Chapter ). Following these methodological and theoretical considerations, the book offers a very thorough and extremely well-narrated account of the historical emergence and contested making of what Witt calls the ‘African anti-coup norm’, identifying and analysing actors, changing discourses and concerns. It convincingly demonstrates a strategic de-politicisation, to the detriment of more substantial provisions regarding ‘human rights’, leading to a seemingly inevitable strengthening and legitimation of the AU, even if continuously contested by other regional and international actors (see Chapter ). Subsequent chapters offer a close reading of the historical, socioeconomic and political context of the complexMalagasy crisis (re)emerging in (Chapter ), and present the intervention scenario (Chapter ) as well as the intervention logic (Chapter ). In these, although they are at times a bit lengthy and repetitive, Witt provides an empirically rich and analytically compelling account of the key actors, their different problem perceptions and solutions suggested, as well as the specific forms that they gave to their interventions and the complex often competitive interactions among them. Finally, she links these elaborations back to the book’s main argument, discussing actual ordering effects both on Madagascar and internationally more generally (Chapter ), and pointing to larger patterns of conflict intervention in Africa, beyond Madagascar, that have resulted in similar outcomes (Chapter ). On a critical note, some key terms, such as ‘space’, ‘practice’, as well as ‘order’ itself, would have been worth developing more conceptually and with more precision. Moreover, reference to different intervening actors, across Chapters , and , could have been more systematic, to make it easier to keep track of who did what, when and how this related to efforts employed by other actors. However, these are only minor issues in an otherwise entirely fascinating book that makes a valuable contribution to both African peace and security research and (global) IR.","PeriodicalId":47608,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41534404","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1017/s0022278x22000015
U. Krishna
{"title":"Political Leadership in Africa: leaders and development south of the Sahara by Giovanni Carbone & Alessandro Pellegata Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 386. $99.99 (hbk). – ERRATUM","authors":"U. Krishna","doi":"10.1017/s0022278x22000015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0022278x22000015","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47608,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Modern African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56760620","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}