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Author: Claude Ake
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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Book Description
The book outlines, in a sweeping continental survey and with telling detail, how the democratic commitment has transformed Africa's legacy of dictatorship, military regimes and single-party rule. Yet, at the same time as 'we are all democrats now', Ake shows how cleverly conservative autocrats have stolen the democratic message and subverted its promise. The danger of trivializing democracy into successive multi-party elections, where one narrow elite succeeds another, is a real one in present-day Africa, and the book spells out the hazards that lie ahead for nascent democratic movements at the grassroots.
Author: Claude Ake
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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Book Description
The book outlines, in a sweeping continental survey and with telling detail, how the democratic commitment has transformed Africa's legacy of dictatorship, military regimes and single-party rule. Yet, at the same time as 'we are all democrats now', Ake shows how cleverly conservative autocrats have stolen the democratic message and subverted its promise. The danger of trivializing democracy into successive multi-party elections, where one narrow elite succeeds another, is a real one in present-day Africa, and the book spells out the hazards that lie ahead for nascent democratic movements at the grassroots.
Author: Nic Cheeseman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316239489
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269
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Book Description
This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the history of democracy in Africa and explains why the continent's democratic experiments have so often failed, as well as how they could succeed. Nic Cheeseman grapples with some of the most important questions facing Africa and democracy today, including whether international actors should try and promote democracy abroad, how to design political systems that manage ethnic diversity, and why democratic governments often make bad policy decisions. Beginning in the colonial period with the introduction of multi-party elections and ending in 2013 with the collapse of democracy in Mali and South Sudan, the book describes the rise of authoritarian states in the 1970s; the attempts of trade unions and some religious groups to check the abuse of power in the 1980s; the remarkable return of multiparty politics in the 1990s; and finally, the tragic tendency for elections to exacerbate corruption and violence.
Author: Claude Ake
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815723482
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184
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Book Description
Despite three decades of preoccupation with development in Africa, the economies of most African nations are still stagnating or regressing. For most Africans, incomes are lower than they were two decades ago, health prospects are poorer, malnourishment is widespread, and infrastructures and social institutions are breaking down. An array of factors have been offered to explain the apparent failure of development in Africa, including the colonial legacy, social pluralism, corruption, poor planning and incompetent management, limited in-flow of foreign capital, and low levels of saving and investment. Alone or in combination, these factors are serious impediments to development, but Claude Ake contends that the problem is not that development has failed, but that it was never really on the agenda. He maintains that political conditions in Africa are the greatest impediment to development. In this book, Ake traces the evolution and failure of development policies, including the IMF stabilization programs that have dominated international efforts. He identifies the root causes of the problem in the authoritarian political structure of the African states derived from the previous colonial entities. Ake sketches the alternatives that are struggling to emerge from calamitous failure--economic development based on traditional agriculture, political development based on the decentralization of power, and reliance on indigenous communities that have been providing some measure of refuge from the coercive power of the central state. Ake's argument may become a new paradigm for development in Africa.
Author: John R. Heilbrunn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107049814
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
This book focuses on the history, key industry and policy actors, and political economic outcomes in oil-producing African states, filling a gap in the literature on resource-abundant countries by providing an optimistic assessment of circumstances in contemporary Africa.
Author: Rita Abrahamsen
Publisher: Zed Books
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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Book Description
Examines contemporary development theory and discourse and explores its relationship to processes of democratization in sub-Saharan Africa. Focuses on the emergence and implementation of the good governance discourse. Draws on examples from four countries to demonstrate the impact of structural adjustment on economic and social conditions and describes the activities of democracy movements opposed to adjustment programmes. Concludes that the good governance agenda has been largely unsuccessful in promoting stable multi-party democracies in Africa.
Author: Claude Ake
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
Claude Ake's study is primarily concerned with what he terms 'the most perinicious form of imperialism' namely scientific knowledge. Ake analyses how Western social sciences, whether consciously or inadvertently, foist capitalist values and capitalist development on the Third World, and serve imperialist ends. He unravels the theory of political development/'westernisation', exposing its ideological character and condemning 'Western development studies as worse than useless'. He then develops his analysis of the imperialist and ideological characteristics of Western social sciences to posit alternatives which may more successfully overcome permanent underdevelopment; and advocates a struggle for a new model of social sciences which is socialist-orientated, and that developing countries reject Western models. The study was first published in 1979, revised in 1982, is newly reissued, and for the first time, widely available outside Africa. Claude Ake (1939-1996) was one of Africa's most distinguished political and social scientists and democrats of the twentieth century, writing widely and polemically on what were his life-long concerns of democracy and the future of the African continent.
Author: Joelien Pretorius
Publisher: Juta and Company Ltd
ISBN: 9780702177361
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
In 1991 Samuel Huntington published "The Third Wave: Democratisation in the Late Twentieth Century". The book informed much of the scholarly work on democratisation in Africa. Although comprehensive in classifying the causes and limitations of transitions to democracy, "The Third Wave" was also limited in its definition of democracy and expectations of a new democracy. This volume engages with the topics of democracy and democratisation in contemporary African politics at the local, national and continental level. It acknowledges a conceptual debt to Huntington when discussing elections, party systems, leadership and the development of continental norms of liberal democracy, but also highlights new conversations (eg: about participatory spaces) that go beyond the Third Wave.
Author: Richard A. Joseph
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107633532
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 251
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Book Description
Originally published in 1987, this book examines the relationship between the pattern of party formation in Nigeria and a mode of social, political and economic behaviour Richard Joseph terms 'prebendalism'. He demonstrates the centrality in the Nigerian polity of the struggle to control and exploit public office and argues that state power is usually viewed by Nigerians as an array of prebends, the appropriation of which provides access to the state treasury and to control over remunerative licenses and contracts. In addition, the abiding desire for a democratic political system is frustrated by the deepening of ethnic, linguistic and regional identities. By exploring the ways in which individuals at all social levels contribute to the maintenance of these practices, the book provides an analysis of the impediments to constitutional democracy that is also relevant to the study of other nations.
Author: Larry Jay Diamond
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801862731
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 570
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Book Description
"The country-specific chapters serve to underline the differences between African democracy and liberal democracy, yet some authors are at pains to emphasize that whatever their limitations, African democracies are an advance over what had gone before." -- African Studies Review
Author: Toyin Falola
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108837972
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 691
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Book Description
An introduction to the politics and society of post-colonial Nigeria, highlighting the key themes of ethnicity, democracy, and development.
