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Author: Francis Mading Deng
Publisher: US Institute of Peace Press
ISBN: 1601270348
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
In this innovative and stimulating volume, Francis Deng outlines a new relationship between governments and societies--a relationship informed by Western concepts but based on traditional African values such as respect for human dignity, equality, and self-rule.
Author: Francis Mading Deng
Publisher: US Institute of Peace Press
ISBN: 1601270348
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
In this innovative and stimulating volume, Francis Deng outlines a new relationship between governments and societies--a relationship informed by Western concepts but based on traditional African values such as respect for human dignity, equality, and self-rule.
Author:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198906323
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 438
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Book Description
In its modern history, Africa has experienced different waves of constitutional ordering. The latest democratisation wave, which began in the 1990s, has set the stage over the past decade for what is now a hotly debated issue: do recent, new, or fundamentally revised constitutions truly reflect an African constitutional identity? Thoughtfully navigating a contested field, this volume brings to the fore a number of foundational questions about African constitutionalism. Constitutional Identity and Constitutionalism in Africa asks whether the concept of constitutional identity clarifies our understanding of constitutional change in Africa, including an exploration of the relationship between constitutional identity and a country's unique culture(s) and histories. Building on this, contributions examine the persistent role of colonial heritages in shaping constitutional identity in post-Independence African nations, and the question of path-dependency. Given the enduring influence of the colonial experience, the volume asks how, why, and to what end African constitutions must be 'decolonised' to form an authentic constitutional identity. This theoretical insight is supplemented and further deepened by detailed case studies of South Africa, Ethiopia, Cape Verde, Cameroon, and Egypt and their diverse experience of constitutional continuity and change. This volume in the Stellenbosch Handbooks in African Constitutional Law series, brings together contributions from established scholars and emerging voices on the study of constitutional processes. They provide an urgent critical analysis of existing paradigms, concepts and normative ideologies of modern African constitutionalism in the context of constitutional identity.
Author: Solomon A. Dersso
Publisher: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers
ISBN: 9004235531
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 279
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Book Description
Despite decades of nation-building exercise, ethnic-based claims for substantive equality, justice and equitable political inclusion and socio-economic order continue to result in communal rivalries. These are claims that define and represent the issue of minorities in Africa, of which these conflicts are manifestations. Although ethnic conflicts in Africa have been a subject of a large number of studies, the potential and role of norms on minority rights to address claims that ethno-cultural groups raise has not received the attention it deserves. Based on materials from normative political theory and international human rights law and using an empirical and prescriptive analysis, this book defends a robust system of minority rights built around culture, equality and self-determination. This is employed to elaborate an adequate constitutional design providing policy frameworks (multilingual language policy, recognition and affirmation of cultural diversity,), structures (that ensure just representation and participation of members of all groups) and norms (that guarantee substantive equality and the rights to language, religion and culture). The study then proffers two cases studies (South Africa and Ethiopia) to ascertain how such constitutional design might be translated into actual policy frameworks, institutions and norms.
Author: Okon Akiba
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351949365
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183
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Book Description
The issues addressed in this rewarding book provide new insight into the way we conceive, reflect and study the problems of political transformation and constitution-making in Africa. The study provides a refreshingly in-depth analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of constitutional provisions for managing the challenges of race, religion, ethnicity, citizenship, civil liberties and civil-military relations in Africa's transitional democracies. Tracing emerging trends in constitution-making, it blends the theory of constitutional democracy with case studies, and defines the imperative of social justice.
Author: Charles Manga Fombad
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780198906339
Category : Constitutional law
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This text in the 'Stellenbosch Handbooks in African Constitutional Law' series provides a critical analysis of existing paradigms, concepts, and normative ideologies of modern African constitutional identity.
Author: Bernard Lategan
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509546324
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
This book examines how the interplay between globalization and the assertion of local identities is reshaping the political landscape of Africa. While defending their values against external forces, people simultaneously – and paradoxically – use the interconnectivity of global networks to maximize their particular interests. Focusing on the relation between national identity and state formation, the authors explore the far-reaching consequences of these contradictory dynamics. Although Africa shares many common trends with other parts of the world, it also displays distinctive features. A region characterized by the increased mobility of people, goods and ideas challenges some conventional assumptions of statecraft and also highlights the advantages of federalism – not merely as a constitutional option, but as a pragmatic device for managing diversity and holding fragile states together. The book further explores emerging types of state formation in the same political space, as exemplified by the combination of elements of a kingdom, an independent state and a national power base in the province of KwaZulu-Natal and the careful crafting of an alternative state within a state by the Solidarity Movement in South Africa. Informed by examples and case studies drawn from different parts of Africa, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Africa, politics, sociology, media studies and the social sciences more generally.
Author: Charles Ngwena
Publisher: Pretoria University Law Press
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
What is Africanness? Contesting nativism in race, culture and sexualities by Charles Ngwena 2018 ISBN: 978-1-920538-82-8 Pages: 306 Print version: Available Electronic version: Free PDF available About the publication What is Africanness: Contesting nativism in culture, race and sexualities, by Charles Ngwena, Professor of Law at the Centre for Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria, is a peer-reviewed monograph aiming to contribute to the ongoing scholarly conversation in and beyond South Africa about who is African and what is African. It aims to implicate a reductive sameness in the naming of Africans (‘nativism’) by showing its teleology and effects; and offers an alternative understanding of how Africans can be named or can name themselves. The book develops an epistemology for constructing the hermeneutics of Africanness today, long after the primal colonial moment and its debasing racialising ideology. It interrogates the making of Africa in colonial discourses and the making of an African race and African culture(s) and sexuality(ies) in ways that are not just historically conscious but also have a heuristic capacity to contest nativism from the outside as well as from within. The arguments in this book go beyond problematising African identity by addressing an existential gap in theory for explicating African social identity. The book develops an interpretive method – a hermeneutics – for locating and deciphering African identifications in ways that are historically conscious and conjunctural. The hermeneutics look to the present and the future in addition to the past, so that African identifications are not nailed to a mast but remain invested with mobility and the capacity to mutate radically and make new and unexpected beginnings. Comments Charles Ngwena’s timely and original book is a wonderful read, rich in theory and insight, and an essential companion for those interested in exploring the ‘multiplicity of histories, cultures and subjectivities’ that constitute the diversity of ‘Africanness’ and African identities. – Professor Cathi Albertyn, School of Law, University of the Witwatersrand, Editor, South African Journal on Human Rights This is a brilliant exploration of liberating and affirming ways to speak of African identities and sexualities, reminding us there can be creative beauty where pain and dispossession have resided. – Rudo Chigudu, Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria This is a masterpiece! Not only does the author capture the discourse and debates on “Africanness”, he aptly examines them before offering his views on “decentring the race of Africanness” with the important recognition of “Africa as land of diverse identifications”. – Prof Serges Djoyou Kamga, Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute, UNISA Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PREFACE DEDICATION PART 1: BACKGROUND TO THE HERMENEUTICS OF HETEROGENOUS AFRICANNESS 1. INTRODUCING THE ‘MANYNESS’ OF AFRICANNESS 1 Introduction 2 Nativism 2.1 Theocratic vision 2.2 Logic of identity 3 Reformulating African identity: Overcoming status subordination and achieving inclusive equality 4 Scope and structure of the book: A broad triangulation of race, culture and sexualities 4.1 Part 1: Background to the hermeneutics of heterogeneous Africanness 4.2 Part 2: Africanness, race and culture 4.3 Part 3: Heterogeneous sexualities 2. HERMENEUTICS OF AFRICANNESS: BUILDING ON STUART HALL’S CULTURAL THEORY OF IDENTIFICATIONS 1 Introduction 2 Connecting inclusive equality with a deconstructive hermeneutics of Africanness 3 Who/what is African?: A central discursive question 4 Hall’s cultural theory of identity as enunciation 4.1 Identity as becoming and being 4.2 Implications of a Hallian approach for conceptualising Africanness 4.2.1 Transposing Hall’s theory to Africanness as broad cultural and racial identifications 4.2.2 Transposing Hall’s theory onto African sexuality identifications 5 Positionality PART 2: AFRICANNESS, RACE AND CULTURE 3. WHAT’S IN A NAME? THE NAMING OF AFRICA AND AFRICANS, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF RADICAL CULTURAL ALTERITY 1 Introduction: Representation, truth, knowledge and power 2 Naming of Africa 2.1 Provenance of the naming 3 Naming of Africans: Epochal re-description 3.1 Africa at the edge of time: The founding of alterity in anachronistic space 3.2 Africa as land of cultural otherness: A leaf from Mudimbe’s The invention of Africa 3.2.1 Christianity and the production of African spiritual alterity 3.2.2 Anthropology and the production of African cultural alterity 4 Mudimbe’s contribution to dialogic Africanness 4. AFRICA AS LAND OF RACIAL OTHERNESS 1 Introduction 2 The contribution of philosophy and science to the construction of African racial alterity 2.1 Philosophy 2.2 Science 3 Re-membering Saartjie Baartman: Black embodiment, ascribed identity and fetishisation 3.1 Logic of identity 3.2 Fetishisation 4 Apartheid and the banality of race 4.1 Creating ‘Africans’, ‘Coloureds’, ‘Indians’ and ‘Whites’ 4.1.1 ‘Africans’ and ‘Whites’ as extreme polarities 4.1.2 ‘Coloureds’ 4.1.3 ‘Indians’ 4.2 Racial positioning among inferiorised ‘races’ 4.3 Apartheid as not so much about apartness but baasskapism 5 Ode to an open Africanness 5. DECENTRING THE RACE OF AFRICANNESS 1 Introduction: putting race under erasure 2 Recalling Hall’s deconstructive identification template 3 Decentring the race of Africanness 3.1 Appiah’s In my father’s house 3.2 Blyden’s black personality 4 Retaining the political salience of race 4.1 Afropolitanism 5 Africa as space for diverse identifications and recognition of ever-evolving ethnicities PART 3: HETEROGENEOUS SEXUALITIES 6. REPRESENTING AFRICAN SEXUALITIES: CONTESTING NATIVISM FROM WITHOUT 1 Introduction 2 Said’s discourse of orientalism 2.1 Orientalism and Said’s aporias 2.1.1 Hybridity: Breaking with coloniser/ colonised binary 3 Nativising African peoples 4 Mamdani’s discourse of nativism 5 Nativism and the construction of colonial whiteness 5.1 Compulsory whiteness and regulation of sexualities 6 Nativising black men’s sexuality 6.1 Southern Rhodesia and the phantom of the ‘black peril’ 7 Black women’s sexual degeneracy and colonial continuities in Caldwell et al: A performative study of African women 7. ‘TRANSGRESSIVE’ SEXUALITIES: CONTESTING NATIVISM FROM WITHIN AND OVERCOMING STATUS SUBORDINATION 1 Introduction 1.1 Proclaiming heterosexuality and castigating homosexuality 1.2 Democratising sexuality 2 Discursive clarifications 2.1 Transgressive sexualities: the terminological rationale 2.2 Overcoming status subordination 2.3 Avoiding LGBTI essentialism 2.4 Avoiding unproductive LGBTI anti-essentialism 2.5 Remaining conscious of colonising sexuality knowledge 3 Deconstructing sexualities 3.1 Essentialist social construction 3.2 Transformative social construction 3.3 Deconstructing the relationship between sexuality and gender: Drawing on Richardson’s analytic template 3.3.1 Naturalist approach 3.3.2 Prioritising gender over sexuality 3.3.3 Gender as an effect of sexuality 3.3.4 Sex and gender as separate, non-deterministic, historically and culturally situated systems 3.3.5 Sexuality and gender elision 4 Way forward 8. MEDIATING CONFLICTING SEXUALITY IDENTIFICATIONS THROUGH POLITICS AND AN ETHICS OF PLURALISM 1 Introduction 2 Rawls’ overlapping consensus 3 Rescher’s dissensus management approach 4 Young’s critique of the ideal of impartiality and the civic public 5 Arendt’s concept of citizenship in a plural political community 6 Finding an overlapping consensus and asymmetrical reciprocity in African political and constitutional frameworks EPILOGUE: THEORISING AFRICANNESS BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX
Author: Yonatan Tesfaye Fessha
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317140974
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 341
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Book Description
How federalism can be used to provide recognition and accommodate ethnic groups is an important topic, not only in Africa, but in multi-ethnic communities around the world. Examining how institutions of multi-ethnic states have been designed to accommodate ethnic diversity while at the same time maintaining national unity, this book locates institutional responses to the challenges of ethnic diversity within the context of a federal arrangement. It examines how a federal arrangement has been used to reconcile the conflicting pressures of the demand for the recognition of distinctive identities, on the one hand, and the promotion of political and territorial integrity, on the other. Comparative case studies of South Africa and Ethiopia as the two federal systems provide a contrasting approach to issues of ethnic diversity. Suggesting new ways in which federalism might work, the author identifies key institutions lessons which will help to build an all-inclusive society.
Author: Francis M. Deng
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 9780815707189
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 452
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Book Description
While dramatic changes are taking place on the international scene and among the major powers, Africa continues to suffer from a multitude of violent conflicts. The toll of these conflicts is monumental in terms of war damage to productivity, scarce resources diverted to armaments and military organizations, and the resulting insecurity, displacement, and destruction. At the same time, Africans, in response to internal demands as well as to international changes, have begun to focus their attention and energies on these problems and are trying innovative ways to resolve differences by nonviolent means. The outcomes of these attempts have urgent and complex implications for the future of the continent with respect to human rights, principles of democracy, and economic development. In this book, African, European, and U.S. experts examine these important issues and the prospects for conflict management and resolution in Africa. They review the scholarship in resolution in light of international changes now taking place. Addressing the undying, internal causes of conflict, they question whether global events will promote peace or threaten to unleash even more conflict. The authors focus their analysis on the issues involved in African conflicts and examine the areas in need of the most dramatic changes. They offer specific recommendations for dealing with current problems, but caution that unless policymakers confront the security situation in Africa, further destruction to national unity and political and economic stability is imminent. Case studies and themes for further, long-term research are recommended.
Author: Berihun Adugna Gebeye
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192646141
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
A Theory of African Constitutionalism asks and seeks to answer why we need a new theoretical framework for African constitutionalism and how this could offer us better theoretical and practical tools with which to understand, improve, and assess African constitutionalism on its own terms. By locating constitutional studies in Africa within the experiences, interactions, and contestations of power and governance beginning in precolonial times, the book presents the development and transformation of African constitutional systems across time and place, along with the attendant constitutional designs and practices ranging from the nature and operation of the African state to its vertical and horizontal government structures, to its constitutional rights regime. This title offers both a theoretically and comparatively rich, historically and contextually informed, and temporally and spatially extensive account of the nature, travails, and incremental successes of African constitutionalism with detailed case studies from Nigeria, Ethiopia, and South Africa. A Theory of African Constitutionalism provides scholars, policymakers, governments, and constitution builders in Africa and beyond with new insights for reimagining the purpose, substance, and scope of constitutions and constitutionalism.
