Kingdom, State and Civil Society in Africa: Conceptual and Political Collisions

Kingdom, State and Civil Society in Africa: Conceptual and Political Collisions PDF

Author: Nelson Kasfir

Publisher: BASLER AFRIKA BIBLIOGRAPHIEN

Published: 2017-12-15

Total Pages: 59

ISBN-13: 390575889X

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Civil society is one of several Western political and social concepts that have not traveled successfully to Africa. Revived in response to the search for democracy in Eastern Europe during the late Soviet era, Western donors promoted and funded new civil society organizations in sub-Saharan Africa, regarding them as an essential grounding for African democratization. Most of these new civil society organizations had little in common with African associational activity. Focusing on the characteristics and behavior of longstand-ing African organizations would appear a better starting point for developing a useful concept of an African civil society. One candidate worth serious investigation is the Buganda Kingdom Government. This organization violates most distinctions central to Western notions of civil society. Yet it continues to behave like a civil society organization. Its political and conceptual collisions offer guidance toward a useful notion of African civil society and understanding Ugandan politics.

Kingdom, State and Civil Society in Africa

Kingdom, State and Civil Society in Africa PDF

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Civil society is one of several Western political and social concepts that have not traveled successfully to Africa. Revived in response to the search for democracy in Eastern Europe during the late Soviet era, Western donors promoted and funded new civil society organizations in sub-Saharan Africa, regarding them as an essential grounding for African democratization. Most of these new civil society organizations had little in common with African associational activity. Focusing on the characteristics and behavior of long-standing African organizations would appear a better starting point for developing a useful concept of an African civil society. One candidate worth serious investigation is the Buganda Kingdom Government. This organization violates most distinctions central to Western notions of civil society. Yet it continues to behave like a civil society organization. Its political and conceptual collisions offer guidance toward a useful notion of African civil society and understanding Ugandan politics.

Protection, Patronage, or Plunder? British Machinations and (B)uganda’s Struggle for Independence

Protection, Patronage, or Plunder? British Machinations and (B)uganda’s Struggle for Independence PDF

Author: Apollo N. Makubuya

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2019-01-17

Total Pages: 547

ISBN-13: 1527525961

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In the scramble for Africa, Britain took a lion’s share of the continent. It occupied and controlled vast territories, including the Uganda Protectorate – which it ruled for 68 years. Early administrators in the region encountered the progressive kingdom of Buganda, which they incorporated into the British Empire. Under the guise of protection, indirect rule and patronage, Britain overran, plundered and disempowered the kingdom’s traditional institutions. On liquidation of the Empire, Buganda was coaxed into a problematic political order largely dictated from London. Today, 56 years after independence, the kingdom struggles to rediscover itself within Uganda’s fragile politics. Based on newly de-classified records, this book reconstructs a history of the machinations underpinning British imperial interests in (B)Uganda and the personalities who embodied colonial rule. It addresses Anglo-Uganda relations, demonstrating how Uganda’s politics reflects its colonial past, and the forces shaping its future. It is a far-reaching examination of British rule in (B)uganda, questioning whether it was designed for protection, for patronage or for plunder.

Unravelling the Mysteries of Africa's Underdevelopment

Unravelling the Mysteries of Africa's Underdevelopment PDF

Author: W. Forje

Publisher: African Books Collective

Published: 2020-05-19

Total Pages: 592

ISBN-13: 9956551880

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Unravelling the mysteries of Africas underdevelopment presents an Afrocentric ideological understanding of the continents fragmentation; a scientific and objective (Mijadala) discourse as well as an approach of how to move progressively and sustainably Africa forward. The breadth and depth of the book shows the unwavering impoverishment and urgent need for the continent to stand up and take the bull by the horn. It offers an inspiring means of grappling with the continents problems to build the change we want An African Wealth of Nation not the continent of collapsed, failed states under the governance construct of centralised authoritarian regimes It is a thought-provoking discourse that challenges us all to be inherent participants in the reconstruction of a Brave New Africa far beyond the 21st Century.

Inequality, Socio-cultural Differentiation and Social Structures in Africa

Inequality, Socio-cultural Differentiation and Social Structures in Africa PDF

Author: Dieter Neubert

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-06-25

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 3030171116

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This book contends that conventional class concepts are not able to adequately capture social inequality and socio-cultural differentiation in Africa. Earlier empirical findings concerning ethnicity, neo-traditional authorities, patron-client relations, lifestyles, gender, social networks, informal social security, and even the older debate on class in Africa, have provided evidence that class concepts do not apply; yet these findings have mostly been ignored. For an analysis of the social structures and persisting extreme inequality in African societies – and in other societies of the world – we need to go beyond class, consider the empirical realities and provincialise our conventional theories. This book develops a new framework for the analysis of social structure based on empirical findings and more nuanced approaches, including livelihood analysis and intersectionality, and will be useful for students and scholars in African studies and development studies, sociology, social anthropology, political science and geography.

Global Trends 2040

Global Trends 2040 PDF

Author: National Intelligence Council

Publisher: Cosimo Reports

Published: 2021-03

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 9781646794973

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"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

The Politics of Neoliberal Democracy in Africa

The Politics of Neoliberal Democracy in Africa PDF

Author: Usman A. Tar

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2008-10-30

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0857715763

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Since the late 1980s the changing dynamic of global development has driven the tide of democratic expansion in the developing world. In Africa, western donors have sought to impose 'neo-liberal' visions of socio-economic and political institution-building, spreading political reforms and economic liberalisation with far-reaching consequences. Associated with external interventions, but also sometimes conflicting with them, are internal protests against authoritarianism, which have problematically reinforced and/or undermined the donor agenda for democratic reform.Here, Usman Tar questions the assumption that Africa was lacking the essential components for a spontaneous transition to democracy. He explores the dynamic, but contradictory, links between external and internal dimensions of neo-liberal democratic expansion in Africa, focusing on Nigeria. Tar dissects the struggles for democracy, and for democratic policy and practice in a country with rich economic potential but a troubled political dispensation.

The Politics of Civil Society

The Politics of Civil Society PDF

Author: Powell, Fred

Publisher: Policy Press

Published: 2013-04-24

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1447309499

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The politics of civil society is an original, thought provoking analysis which challenges one-dimensional neoliberal thinking about civil society, and seeks to rediscover its radical roots. The original edition shifted the scholarly debate onto the new ground, offering an accessible and compelling analysis of one of the central issues of our times. In the second, revised edition of this indispensable book, the author looks behind 'the mirror of power' to discover the reality of civil society - or 'Big Society', as it has become known. He finds not one but three forms of civil society: radical, liberal and conservative. In complex interplay between state and civil society, the author argues that citizens contend for power through civil society. This is both an age-long pursuit dating from antiquity and a contemporary democratic struggle between competing visions of modernity that determines the 'real' in politics, as experienced by the citizens. The book will have wide appeal to a broad cross-disciplinary audience.

Global Civil Society?

Global Civil Society? PDF

Author: John Keane

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2003-04-17

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9780521894623

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John Keane, a leading scholar of political theory, tracks the recent development of a big idea with fresh potency - global civil society. In this timely book, Keane explores the contradictory forces currently nurturing or threatening its growth, and he shows how talk of global civil society implies a political vision of a less violent world, founded on legally sanctioned power-sharing arrangements among different and intermingling forms of socio-economic life. Keane's reflections are pitted against the widespread feeling that the world is both too complex and too violent to deserve serious reflection. His account borrows from various scholarly disciplines, including political science and international relations, to challenge the silence and confusion within much of contemporary literature on globalisation and global governance. Against fears of terrorism, rising tides of xenophobia, and loose talk of 'anti-globalisation', the defence of global civil society mounted here implies the need for new democratic ways of living.