Everyday State and Democracy in Africa

Everyday State and Democracy in Africa PDF Author: Wale Adebanwi
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821447793
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 606

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Book Description
Bottom-up case studies, drawn from the perspective of ordinary Africans’ experiences with state bureaucracies, structures, and services, reveal how citizens and states define each other. This volume examines contemporary citizens’ everyday encounters with the state and democratic processes in Africa. The contributions reveal the intricate and complex ways in which quotidian activities and experiences—from getting an identification card (genuine or fake) to sourcing black-market commodities to dealing with unreliable waste collection—both (re)produce and (re)constitute the state and democracy. This approach from below lends gravity to the mundane and recognizes the value of conceiving state governance not in terms of its stated promises and aspirations but rather in accordance with how people experience it. Both new and established scholars based in Africa, Europe, and North America cover a wide range of examples from across the continent, including bureaucratic machinery in South Sudan, Nigeria, and Kenya infrastructure and shortages in Chad and Nigeria disciplinarity, subjectivity, and violence in Rwanda, South Africa, and Nigeria the social life of democracy in the Congo, Cameroon, and Mozambique education, welfare, and health in Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burkina Faso Everyday State and Democracy in Africa demonstrates that ordinary citizens’ encounters with state agencies and institutions define the meanings, discourses, practices, and significance of democratic life, as well its distressing realities. Contributors: Daniel Agbiboa Victoria Bernal Jean Comaroff John L. Comaroff E. Fouksman Fred Ikanda Lori Leonard Rose Løvgren Ferenc Dávid Markó Ebenezer Obadare Rogers Orock Justin Pearce Katrien Pype Edoardo Quaretta Jennifer Riggan Helle Samuelsen Nicholas Rush Smith Eric Trovalla Ulrika Trovalla

Everyday State and Democracy in Africa

Everyday State and Democracy in Africa PDF Author: Wale Adebanwi
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821447793
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 606

Get Book

Book Description
Bottom-up case studies, drawn from the perspective of ordinary Africans’ experiences with state bureaucracies, structures, and services, reveal how citizens and states define each other. This volume examines contemporary citizens’ everyday encounters with the state and democratic processes in Africa. The contributions reveal the intricate and complex ways in which quotidian activities and experiences—from getting an identification card (genuine or fake) to sourcing black-market commodities to dealing with unreliable waste collection—both (re)produce and (re)constitute the state and democracy. This approach from below lends gravity to the mundane and recognizes the value of conceiving state governance not in terms of its stated promises and aspirations but rather in accordance with how people experience it. Both new and established scholars based in Africa, Europe, and North America cover a wide range of examples from across the continent, including bureaucratic machinery in South Sudan, Nigeria, and Kenya infrastructure and shortages in Chad and Nigeria disciplinarity, subjectivity, and violence in Rwanda, South Africa, and Nigeria the social life of democracy in the Congo, Cameroon, and Mozambique education, welfare, and health in Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burkina Faso Everyday State and Democracy in Africa demonstrates that ordinary citizens’ encounters with state agencies and institutions define the meanings, discourses, practices, and significance of democratic life, as well its distressing realities. Contributors: Daniel Agbiboa Victoria Bernal Jean Comaroff John L. Comaroff E. Fouksman Fred Ikanda Lori Leonard Rose Løvgren Ferenc Dávid Markó Ebenezer Obadare Rogers Orock Justin Pearce Katrien Pype Edoardo Quaretta Jennifer Riggan Helle Samuelsen Nicholas Rush Smith Eric Trovalla Ulrika Trovalla

The Everyday State in Africa

The Everyday State in Africa PDF Author: Daniel Mulugeta
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781032174921
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
This book offers a new understanding of the workings of the everyday Ethiopian state through analysis of the everyday politics of state-society relations.

Everyday Corruption and the State

Everyday Corruption and the State PDF Author: Giorgio Blundo
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1848136641
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Daily life in Africa is governed by the 'petty' corruption of public officials in services such as health, transport, or the judicial system. This remarkable study of everyday corruption in three African countries investigates the reasons for its extraordinary prevalence. The authors construct an illuminating analytical framework around the various forms of corruption, the corruptive strategies public officials resort to, and how these forms and strategies have become embedded in daily administrative practices. They investigate the roots of the system in the growing inability of weakened states in Africa to either reward their employees adequately or to deliver expected services. They conclude that corruption in Africa today is qualitatively different from other parts of the world in its pervasiveness, its legitimations, and its huge impact on the nature of the state.

The Political Economy of Everyday Life in Africa

The Political Economy of Everyday Life in Africa PDF Author: Wale Adebanwi
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1847011659
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
Multi-disciplinary examination of the role of ordinary African people as agents in the generation and distribution of well-being in modern Africa.

Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa

Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa PDF Author: John L. Comaroff
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226114149
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
The essays in this important new collection explore the diverse, unexpected, and controversial ways in which the idea of civil society has recently entered into populist politics and public debate throughout Africa. In a substantial introduction, anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff offer a critical theoretical analysis of the nature and deployment of the concept—and the current debates surrounding it. Building on this framework, the contributors investigate the "problem" of civil society across their regions of expertise, which cover the continent. Drawing creatively on one another's work, they examine the impact of colonial ideology, postcoloniality, and development practice on discourses of civility, the workings of everyday politics, the construction of new modes of selfhood, and the pursuit of moral community. Incisive and original, the book shows how struggles over civil society in Africa reveal much about larger historical forces in the post-Cold War era. It also makes a strong case for the contribution of historical anthropology to contemporary discourses on the rise of a "new world order."

The Everyday Life of the State

The Everyday Life of the State PDF Author: Adam White
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295804637
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Today there are more states controlling more people than at any other point in history. We live in a world shaped by the authority of the state. Yet the complexion of state authority is patchy and uneven. While it is almost always possible to trace the formal rules governing human interaction to the statute books of one state or another, in reality the words in these books often have little bearing upon what is happening on the ground. Their meanings are intentionally and unintentionally misrepresented by those who are supposed to enforce them and by those who are supposed to obey them, generating a range of competing authorities, voices, and allegiances. The Everyday Life of the State explores this "everyday" transformation of state authority into multiple scripts, narratives, and political activities. Drawing upon case studies from across the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia, the chapters in this book investigate the many ways in which those subjects traditionally regarded as being weak, passive, and obedient manage not only to resist the authority of state actors but to actively subvert and appropriate it, in the process making, unmaking, and remaking the boundaries between state and society over and over again. Collectively, these chapters make an important contribution to the expanding literature on "everyday politics." The "state in society" concept used in this volume has been developed by political scientist Joel S. Migdal, the Robert F. Philip Professor of International Studies in the University of Washington's Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies.

States at Work

States at Work PDF Author: Thomas Bierschenk
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004264965
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
States at Work explores the mundane practices of state-making in Africa by focussing on the daily functioning of public services and the practices of civil servants.

The Bright Continent

The Bright Continent PDF Author: Dayo Olopade
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547678339
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
“For anyone who wants to understand how the African economy really works, The Bright Continent is a good place to start” (Reuters). Dayo Olopade knew from personal experience that Western news reports on conflict, disease, and poverty obscure the true story of modern Africa. And so she crossed sub-Saharan Africa to document how ordinary people deal with their daily challenges. She found what cable news ignores: a continent of ambitious reformers and young social entrepreneurs driven by kanju—creativity born of African difficulty. It’s a trait found in pioneers like Kenneth Nnebue, who turned cheap VHS tapes into the multimillion-dollar film industry Nollywood. Or Ushahidi, a technology collective that crowdsources citizen activism and disaster relief. A shining counterpoint to conventional wisdom, The Bright Continent rewrites Africa’s challenges as opportunities to innovate, and celebrates a history of doing more with less as a powerful model for the rest of the world. “[An] upbeat study of development in Africa . . . The book is written more in wonder at African ingenuity than in anger at foreign incomprehension.” —The New Yorker “A hopeful narrative about a continent on the rise.” —The New York Times Book Review

Democracy in Ghana

Democracy in Ghana PDF Author: Jeffrey W. Paller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316513300
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
A detailed account of politics in Ghana's urban neighborhoods, providing a new way to understand African democracy and development.

Evil in Africa

Evil in Africa PDF Author: William C. Olsen
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253017505
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
William C. Olsen, Walter E. A. van Beek, and the contributors to this volume seek to understand how Africans have confronted evil around them. Grouped around notions of evil as a cognitive or experiential problem, evil as malevolent process, and evil as an inversion of justice, these essays investigate what can be accepted and what must be condemned in order to evaluate being and morality in African cultural and social contexts. These studies of evil entanglements take local and national histories and identities into account, including state politics and civil war, religious practices, Islam, gender, and modernity.