Showing papers on "African studies published in 2022"

Organized Crime–Terror Nexus: Interrogating the Linkage Between Banditry and Terrorism in Northern Nigeria

Abstract: This paper examines the phenomenon of crime–terror nexus from the standpoint of the linkage between banditry and Boko Haram insurgency in Northern Nigeria. Using a descriptive analysis predicated on a combination of primary and secondary studies, the paper reveals that both groups have functionally adapted each other’s structures and strategies. While Boko Haram and its splinter groups have occasionally engaged in acts of banditry, there has been mutual co-option by both groups as the exigencies of their operations demand. Nigeria’s drive at mitigating the banditry-terrorism conundrum must proceed with a pragmatic understanding of the gamut and dynamics of their situational nexuses.

African Studies in Distress: German Scholarship on Africa and the Neglected Challenge of Decoloniality

Abstract: This paper is a response to Matthias Basedau's article published in issue 55/2020 of the present journal. At a time when African Studies scholarship is rising beyond the flogging of dead horses, certain strands in the field in Germany seem to ignore much of the valuable scholarship and intellectual contributions by excellent African and non-African researchers alike. It is striking to see how Basedau falls prey to the same shortcomings that he draws our attention to, that is, the domination of African Studies by sources and figures outside the continent and the construction of Africa as a space of lack. This underscores the urgency of decolonizing African Studies at many levels, including liberating it from the straightjacket of area studies, interrogating purportedly objective scholarship, and opening it up to new theoretical perspectives. The restriction to comparative approaches will only ensure that these strands in African Studies remain stuck in their epistemological cul-de-sac.

From Algiers to Timbuktu: Multi-Local Research in Colonial History Across the Saharan Divide

Abstract: Abstract The so-called “Saharan Divide” separating sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa into distinct fields has a long and complicated history. Paradoxically, given its dense historiography, this divide is particularly pronounced in scholarship on the colonial period. This article proposes an approach to researching across this division, centered on research in multiple African archives, to build a “multi-local” understanding of colonial-era trans-Saharan Africa. This approach is illustrated by the story of Algerians who taught in colonial schools in Mauritania and French Soudan, and by the author’s discovery of this story in sites across northwest Africa. This approach can help scholars reconceptualize multi-sited research and reevaluate the Area Studies divisions that continue to structure knowledge of African history.

China–Africa Relations in The Economist, 2019–2021

Abstract: The ‘Scramble for Africa’ has historically been a concept used to describe the plunder of Africa by colonial powers, their subsequent economic capture of African resources, their political control and their racial domination of Africans. But, in recent times, many writers have pointed to Chinese ‘Scramble for Africa’. Of these depictions, The Economist’s has been both categorical and relentless. But is the set of relationships between China and African countries imperial? Does it amount to a Chinese ‘Scramble for Africa’? If so, what can be done; if not, why not? Neither content nor institutional analyses of 27 stories, sampled from 132 issues of The Economist from 2019 to 2021, show conclusive evidence that the relationship between China and Africa is imperial. Evidence of African indebtedness to China, Chinese opaque resource transactions in Africa, and the controlling effect of China’s Belt and Road Initiative typically emphasised by The Economist is serious. But it does not amount to economic plunder, political control, military destabilisation or racial domination. The Economist’s characterisation of China–Africa relations reflects wider processes of Westernisation. Its features include the use of mainstream economic analysis, (mis)representation of the Global South to maintain Western hegemony and inhibiting Southern struggle to break the Western chokehold on global development. As an elite newspaper, The Economist’s ‘frame analysis’ not only presents news, but also produces views that caricature Global South agendas, especially those that threaten Western liberalism and imperialism.

A Ritual Geology

Abstract: Set against the ongoing corporate enclosure of West Africa’s goldfields, A Ritual Geology tells the untold history of one of the world’s oldest indigenous gold mining industries: Francophone West Africa’s orpaillage. Establishing African miners as producers of subterranean knowledge, Robyn d’Avignon uncovers a dynamic “ritual geology” of techniques and cosmological engagements with the earth developed by agrarian residents of gold-bearing rocks in savanna West Africa. Colonial and corporate exploration geology in the region was built upon the ritual knowledge, gold discoveries, and skilled labor of African miners even as states racialized African mining as archaic, criminal, and pagan. Spanning the medieval and imperial past to the postcolonial present, d’Avignon weaves together long-term ethnographic and oral historical work in southeastern Senegal with archival and archeological evidence from Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, and Mali. A Ritual Geology introduces transnational geological formations as a new regional framework for African studies, environmental history, and anthropology.

Introduction: From the idea of Africa to the African idea of Africa

Abstract: This special issue is part of the collaborative research project initiated by the Chair in Epistemologies of the Global South with Emphasis on Africa, based at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, and the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS), based at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. The collaborative project is entitled “The Changing African Idea of Africa and the Future of African Studies.” At the University of Bayreuth, the research project is also part of The African Multiple Cluster of Excellencesupported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (grant number EX 20521-390713894). The overarching agenda of The African Multiple Cluster of Excellence is that of reconfiguring African Studies, and at the centre of this is the imperative of doing AfricanStudies with Africans while also privileging African voices and intellectual/academic productions.

Book Review: Unmaking Colonialism, Thinking Emancipation: Reviewing the Mamdani–Neocosmos Debate

Abstract: security’ beyond the legitimacy issue” and “argues that regime security can be tied to other dynamics of identity, such as fluidity, distinctiveness and consistency” (pp. 21–23). This comprehensive approach is defined as ontological security by Darwich, and focuses on the dynamic interaction between two accounts, analyzing their changing roles and weight in the alliances and threat perceptions in the region. Summarizing several leading scenarios in regard to the changing impact and role of the material–ideational factors, Darwich contends that one force (ideational or material) generally overrides the decision-making process, albeit with consistent interplay between them. In this context, Darwich identifies several conditions under which material or ideational causes will be predominant. Even though she scrutinizes several aspects of these conditions, they are mainly stated first as the “fluidity of the regime identity—assessed through mutability of the regime identity narrative” and second as “the clarity of the relative power distribution— assessed through the multiplicity of available policy options to ensure physical security” (p. 24). In this approach, if there exists clear material threats (physical security) to any regime in the region and if this regime has enough possibilities to use different identities at its disposal, then material/ physical necessities will dominate the process. Yet, if the opposite scenario arises, where state identity is rigid and fixed and material threats are not visible enough, this regime will probably consider ideational factors (ontological security) as more urgent in the process of alliance formation. In other words, the “analytical eclecticism” method (p. 30). Thus, Darwich traces the process of the interaction between physical and ontological security needs and specifies the conditions whereby one of these factors dominates the decision-making process. After she clarifies her theoretical position and presents the key concepts (chapters 3, 4, and 5), Darwich effectively applies her approach to the selected cases. In these chapters, she sheds light on the interesting and challenging alliance preferences and threat perceptions of the Syrian and Saudi Arabian regime. She initially questions why the Baathist, secular, and pro-Arab Syrian regime aligned with the Islamic and Persian Iranian regime during the Iran–Iraq war (1980–1988), while the Islamist Saudi regime mostly backed another Baathist and secular regime. In the second case, another critical war (the 2006 Israel–Hezbollah war), the Syrian regime encompassed the Islamist Hezbollah to counter Israel militarily and Saudi Arabia considered Hezbollah’s Islamist position as the main threat to its ontological security. Validating the difference between ontological and physical security and the interplay between them in the third case, Darwich probes the reasons behind the implicit Saudi alignment with Israel in its war against Hamas during 2009. In this war, Syria perceived Israel’s military power as the main threat and supported the Muslim Brotherhoodinspired and Sunni-based Hamas to balance Israel even though Syria radically opposed Muslim Brotherhood affiliations in its country. In conclusion, Darwich’s endeavor is to overcome the dichotomies inherent in the discipline and in regional studies which simply offer a one-factorbased approach to the threat perceptions and alliance formations by “presenting a two-layered conception of security, namely ontological and physical” (p. 161). In this sense, the Saudi and Syrian regimes’ reactions to three critical regional conflicts are considered by the author as the most important empirical data to validate the mentioned theoretical arguments.

From ‘Bad Samaritans’ to ‘Bad Victims’: A Political Economy of Africa-Nigeria Nexus of Poverty

Abstract: This paper examines the linkages between moral categorisations on the international economic order and the dysfunctions that negate efforts at combating the Africa-Nigeria poverty conditions in the contemporary period. Drawing from the thesis of Ha-Joon Chang’s ‘Bad Samaritans’, it analyses the contradictions in the often-repeated declarations on ‘fight against poverty’ in Nigeria and the endemic dysfunctions in leadership and institutions that ought to play significant roles in understanding and recalibrating the hegemonic influence of wealthy nations who control the global economy.

‘You Are Not Needed Here’

Abstract: The aim of this paper is not to expand the argument that racism is a problem particular to Russia but to examine the transformation in the discrimination experienced by African migrants in Russia and their coping strategies. Using 32 in-depth interviews and an analysis of informal conversations with sub-Saharan African migrants in Moscow describing their experiences within the social and economic spheres of the country, the paper demonstrates the subtleness and implicit nature of racial discrimination that sub-Saharan African migrants experience in their social spaces, such as using the transport system and getting accommodation, and also within the economic sector. There is an overall feeling of being unwelcome that the African migrants perceive from the treatment received from their host community. The paper contributes to the global perspective of understanding the coping strategies used by African migrants to deal with their socio-economic conundrum in Russia.

Ben Lindfors and his palavers with African literature

Abstract: Abstract The article discusses Bernth Lindfors’s unique contributions to the field of Anglophone African literary studies, contextualizes his methodology, and discusses the controversies that arose over a few of his interventions to preserve and canonize early African literature. His commitment to the field is unequivocal and the journal he founded, Research in African Literatures, continues to exhibit the brilliance and promise of African literature and literary studies.

Africans are not blameless and how africans underdeveloped africa: a twin response to how europe underdeveloped africa

Abstract: This paper examined the contending views on the development of Africa, focusing essentially on the twin responses from “Africans Are Not Blameless” and “How Africans Underdeveloped Africa,” to Walter Rodney’s “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.” The paper critically reviews and interrogates the contending views on the challenge of development in Africa, bringing out the strengths and weaknesses of these arguments as they border on Africa’s development. With a careful review of these tripod views on the development challenges of the African Continent, the paper argues that both Europe and Africans are to be blamed for the problem of development in Africa as each of the perspectives is found culpable as they fail in their efforts to exhaustively advance a holistic cause and effect analysis of the Africa’s development story. In one way or the other, the attempts to advance their views and justify their stands from the lenses of their propositions, was not completely successful. This is why the paper concludes that, understanding the issue of development in Africa is to synthesize the arguments of these contending views. The paper calls on Africans to rise to the occasion to restore the glory of Africa through perseverance, hard work and reaffirmation of the uniqueness of Africa as a continent, and thus, the need to look inward and reexamine the ways of life of the people as Africans, and with this sense of Africanness, tackle head-on the challenges affecting the continent and reposition it for the greater good of the people.