Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism

Citizen and subject: contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism

The economics of growth has come a long way since it regained center stage for economists in the mid-1980s. Here for the first time is a series of country studies guided by that research. The thirteen essays, by leading economists, shed light on some of the most important growth puzzles of our time. How did China grow so rapidly despite the absence of full-fledged private property rights? What happened in India after the early 1980s to more than double its growth rate? How did Botswana and Mauritius avoid the problems that other countries in sub--Saharan Africa succumbed to? How did Indonesia manage to grow over three decades despite weak institutions and distorted microeconomic policies and why did it suffer such a collapse after 1997?

	What emerges from this collective effort is a deeper understanding of the centrality of institutions. Economies that have performed well over the long term owe their success not to geography or trade, but to institutions that have generated market-oriented incentives, protected property rights, and enabled stability. However, these narratives warn against a cookie-cutter approach to institution building.

	The contributors are Daron Acemoglu, Maite Careaga, Gregory Clark, J. Bradford DeLong, Georges de Menil, William Easterly, Ricardo Hausmann, Simon Johnson, Daniel Kaufmann, Massimo Mastruzzi, Ian W. McLean, Lant Pritchett, Yingyi Qian, James A. Robinson, Devesh Roy, Arvind Subramanian, Alan M. Taylor, Jonathan Temple, Barry R. Weingast, Susan Wolcott, and Diego Zavaleta.

In Search of Prosperity: Analytic Narratives on Economic Growth

Are predominantly Muslim societies distinctly disadvantaged in democratization? If so, why? The article presents a straightforward cross-national examination of the link between Islam and political regime. The evidence strongly suggests that Muslim countries are in fact democratic underachievers. The nature of the causal connection between Islam and political regime is investigated. Many conventional assumptions about Islam and politics do not withstand scrutiny. But one factor does help explain the dearth of democracy in the Muslim world: the treatment of women and girls. The rudiments of a provisional theory linking the treatment of females and regime type are offered and the implications of the findings for democracy, both in Muslim societies and elsewhere, are discussed.

Islam and Authoritarianism

The paper proposes that reports of pervasive competition and conflict over land in sub-Saharan Africa belie a current image of negotiable and adaptive customary systems of landholding and land use but, instead, reveal processes of exclusion, deepening social divisions and class formation. Cases of ambiguous and indeterminate outcomes among claimants over land do occur, but the instances of intensifying conflict over land, deepening social rifts and expropriation of land beg for closer attention. More emphasis needs to be placed by analysts on who benefits and who loses from instances of ‘negotiability’ in access to land, an analysis that, in turn, needs to be situated in broader political economic and social changes taking place, particularly during the past thirty or so years. This requires a theoretical move away from privileging contingency, flexibility and negotiability that, willy-nilly, ends by suggesting an open field, to one that is able to identify those situations and processes (including commodification, structural adjustment, market liberalization and globalization) that limit or end negotiation and flexibility for certain social groups or categories.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2004.00080.x

Inequality and Social Conflict Over Land in Africa

An African Miracle: State and Class Leadership and Colonial Legacy in Botswana Development

One of the casualties of the gruesome nightmare that is gripping Somalia has been the capacity to think historically and systematically about the nature of the malady, and to find practical ways of controlling the present in order to build a more sustainable future. As explained by Ahmed Samatar: ‘the fullness of understanding a given situation is [not] coterminous with the immediate and experiential.Rather, any visible elements of a particular reality are usually signals that other more discrete factors could be at work’. For far too long, those opposed to Siyad Barre's regime refused to go beyond the General and his constellation of clients to identify ‘the enemy’. Their unwillingness to engage in any hard-headed analysis and their hostility to critical scholarship has undoubtedly helped to condemn the very people they ‘wanted’ to liberate.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0022278X00011083

Destruction of State and Society in Somalia: Beyond the Tribal Convention

This study examines the relationship between Ethiopia's federal and regional authorities since the Tigray led regime came to power in 1991 The redivision of Ethiopia into ethnic regions was aimed to effect two changes: to abolish certain ethnic domination of the state; and to enable various communities to govern their local affairs Using material from the Somali Region, this article evaluates whether ethnic‐based regional authorities have sufficient autonomy from the centre to be accountable to local populations The ability of local people to elect their leaders is central to undoing past ethnic injustices Although communities have gained from the new order, however, the federal ruling party tightly controls regional political authorities Federal domination of regional governance is partly the result of the ineptness of local elite This arrangement creates formal ethnic regions without significantly altering power relations in Ethiopia Consequently, the spirit of the 1991 change is lost as local co

Ethiopian federalism: autonomy versus control in the Somali region

Somali piracy has been poorly understood and consequently the international strategy designed to curtail it has not worked. Because of this mismatch some of the pirates have extended their exploits deep into the Indian Ocean. This article provides an analysis which shows that several pirate types driven by different logics have operated along the Somali coast and all but one of these pirates emerged as a result of the Somali state's disintegration. In contrast, pirates in other Third World regions operate under established states. Therefore, we argue that piracy is not only a matter of robbery on the high seas, but that political economy and conflict over resources have been fundamental to the rise of piracy in the region. The article offers a more refined assessment of the piracy in the region, as well as a critical appraisal of the moral economy of Somali pirates which yields an alternative method of understanding and curbing the problem.

The Dialectics of Piracy in Somalia: the rich versus the poor

Soon after the third-world state was declared impotent, contradictory evidence pointing to the importance of state leadership in development in the Asian miracles came to the fore. This article, through a critical review of the literature, pushes this argument further and claims that geographers have much to contribute to the analysis of the state and its role in development. An appropriate framework for this kind of work is a marriage of radical political economy and certain strands of neo-Weberianism. We suggest that this conceptual union allows for broad theorizing of the capitalist state in the periphery while minding the institutional details of third-world states in particular regions and countries. This approach can help explain the differential performances of various third-world states within the confines of the world system. Thailand and Botswana are used as comparative cases to demonstrate the utility of this framework.

Abdi Ismail Samatar

Papers

An African Miracle: State and Class Leadership and Colonial Legacy in Botswana Development

Destruction of State and Society in Somalia: Beyond the Tribal Convention

Ethiopian federalism: autonomy versus control in the Somali region

The Dialectics of Piracy in Somalia: the rich versus the poor

Development geography and the third-world state