|
|
|
Sort Order |
|
|
|
Items / Page
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
170525
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
This article concerns the organizational expansion undertaken by the opposition party, Chadema, in Tanzania between 2003 and 2015. It argues that Chadema’s extensive party-building enabled it to mobilize on the ground. These organizational developments, as much as elite action, underpinned recent changes in the party system and the opposition’s improved showing in recent elections. Chadema established branches even though many of the prerequisite circumstances typically recognized in the literature were absent. This makes Chadema a deviant case and this deviance has implications for the historical institutionalist literature on party-building. This article complicates Rachel Riedl’s account of state substitution. She links the incorporation or substitution of social actors to different paths of party system institutionalization. This article demonstrates that the character and consequences of state substitution depend upon the balance of power between state and social actors. It also builds on accounts by Adrienne LeBas and others that when social actors are strong, they can endow opposition parties with resources which make branch establishment possible, and when they are weak, they can only act as surrogate party branches. This article illustrates that when social actors are absent from partisan politics, parties have no way to organize except by founding green-site branches.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 2 |
ID:
170524
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
In the nationwide debates in the build-up to the Ghana elections of December 2016, the New Patriotic Party, then in the opposition, claimed that 76,000 individuals were registered on both the Togolese and the Ghanaian voters’ registers, casting doubt on the citizenship status of voters who crossed the border from Togo to vote in Ghana. The issues that political parties continually raise about the voters’ register result in recurrent debates about identification documents and belonging. This article poses the underlying questions that many election analyses overlook: who is the electorate? Who decides who belongs to the nation? I argue that the criteria for belonging are neither those that are set in the law, nor those that seem to be suggested by political parties, but those that are decided at a local level where communities are the real gatekeepers of the vote. This article contributes to the literature on elections in Africa by highlighting the porosity of borders in a mobile world, not purely in terms of electoral outcomes, but in terms of broader issues about citizenship and belonging.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 3 |
ID:
170521
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
Research on Kenya’s 2013 elections has suggested that a “peace narrative” was deliberately promoted by an establishment elite to delegitimize protest and justify the use of excessive force. It has also tended to see the Kenyan case as exceptional and to assume that such a narrative was only possible because of the 2007/2008 post-election violence. We agree that peace campaigns are often particularly intense in the wake of violence and that they can be manipulated to generate a “peaceocracy”, a system in which an emphasis on peace is used to prioritize stability and order to the detriment of democracy. However, by comparing Kenya to Ghana and Uganda, two countries that have had very different experiences of elections and election-related violence, we demonstrate that peace messaging is neither unique to countries that have experienced recent electoral conflict, nor a recent phenomenon. Instead, we highlight the pervasiveness of peace narratives across the sub-continent, which we show is due to a number of factors. These include but are not limited to the way that elections are used to assert and perform state autonomy and an associated ideal of elections as orderly processes; the capacity of multiple actors to instrumentalize the ideal of orderly elections; a popular fear of electoral violence even in countries where it is rare; a growing tendency to individualize responsibility for peace; and the availability of international funding. Taken together, these factors help to explain the rise of peace messaging. At the same time, we argue that the risk that this messaging will foster a “peaceocracy” varies markedly and that the likelihood of incumbent manipulation is greatest in countries with a recent history of civil conflict and where the quality of democracy is already low.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 4 |
ID:
170526
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
A state-led industrialization push inspired by the East Asian ‘developmental state’ model is at the centre of Ethiopia’s recent economic success. This model has historically proved potent for achieving rapid industrialization, but the business-state alliance at the heart of the model generally aimed to curb the power of labour. Focusing on textile and leather manufacturing in Ethiopia, this article addresses two questions: are workers capable of extracting gains from the process of industrialization, and have the actions of workers affected global value chain integration in the two industries? Our data show that opportunities for collective voice among workers are limited. However, workers have expressed their discontent by leaving employers when working conditions fail to meet their expectations. The resulting turnover has generated significant obstacles for local and foreign firms attempting to participate in global value chains. In response, the Ethiopian state and employers implemented a number of measures, including restrictions on emigration and more generous non-wage benefits. Recent research on global value chains and labour highlights how workers are able to influence work practices through individual action. The present article builds on these ideas, but shows that firms and governments have the ability to respond and limit this power.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 5 |
ID:
170522
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
In recent policy frameworks, traditional authorities have been (re)assigned roles of directly representing civil society and local communities as key actors in development, leading to questions about the relationship between the chieftaincy institution and the state in governance. Using the example of a chieftaincy dispute between the Sokpoe and Tefle, a Tongu-Ewe people of Ghana, at the heart of which are claims to paramountcy status, this article argues that chieftaincy and the state are not always parallel institutions of governance that derive their legitimacy from different sources. Struggles over chieftaincy hierarchies have become struggles for the preferential recognition by and access to the state conveyed by membership in the Houses of Chiefs. In effect, the chieftaincy institution may be both parallel to and dependent on the state. The article draws attention to the importance of hierarchy in explaining state-chieftaincy relationships because an understanding of the nuances of legitimacy in chieftaincy will enrich how chiefs are engaged as key actors in development.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 6 |
ID:
170523
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) is among the largest social protection programmes in Africa and has been promoted as a model for the continent. This article analyses the political drivers of the programme, arguing that elite commitment to the PSNP needs to be understood in the context of shifts within Ethiopia’s political settlement and the government’s evolving development strategy. While food security had long been a priority for the ruling party, the 2002/03 food crisis—coming on the back of a series of other political shocks—was perceived as an existential crisis for the ruling coalition, prompting the incorporation of the PSNP into the existing rural development strategy. Foreign donors provided policy ideas and pushed for reform, but it was not until incentives flowing from the political settlement were favourable that elite commitment was secured. Even then, longstanding ideological commitments shaped the productive focus of the programme, ensuring consistency with the development strategy. While the removal of the PSNP is now unthinkable, the extent to which this represents a broader commitment to social protection remains an open question.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 7 |
ID:
170527
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
In December 2018 the Trump Administration announced a new Africa strategy.1 This briefing examines US President Donald Trump’s personal views on Africa, which reveal his lack of interest in the continent, other than for its commercial potential; his Administration’s approach to Africa, which actually demonstrates a good deal of continuity with previous US policy under presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama; and examines the new strategy, which is firmly embedded in the context of Trump’s wider ‘America First’ foreign policy and the United States’ strategic global rivalry with China and Russia. It argues that the Africa strategy is entirely consistent with the President’s overall world view, and is less different from previous US Administrations’ policies on Africa than may appear. But that will not make it any more successful, especially as its internal contradictions are exposed
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|