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As a region of the world capitalist political economy, Africa has been the epitome of neoliberalism as a universal project to remake societies in its image. In Africa, the neoliberal project encountered a region already ensconced in state-forms that were authoritarian, albeit very often weaker than their analogues in Latin America or Southern Europe. In these circumstances, neoliberalism both reconstructed and relied upon authoritarian state practices: reassertions of law and order, rising technocracy, re-built bureaucracies, and 'choiceless democracy'. Liberal advocates of neoliberalism indulged authoritarian governance in the belief that economic liberalization would generate economic growth and transformation. Reviewing these authoritarian neoliberal constructions, one is struck by how poorly they performed as vehicles for market-based capitalist transformation. In a phrase, the pain of neoliberal adjustment was accompanied by no palliative of sustained economic 'gain'. Liberalization, executed by top-down and undemocratic governance, has generated fragile growth, instability, some enrichment and no economic transformation. This conjuncture is pivotal to an understanding of moves by some governing elites to explore and at times implement non-neoliberal development strategies. The article concludes by suggesting that neoliberalism is currently a somewhat besieged orthodoxy. However, the exploration of unorthodox development strategies has taken place within an authoritarian political shell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article approaches Responsibility to Protect (R2P) from the ground up. Selecting African cases of mass atrocity in the age of R2P, it identifies key general features of contemporary violence. The article goes on to consider the nature and extent of R2P practice in each case. The argument is that R2P engagements in these conflicts display a mixture of weakness and irrelevance. The result of this is that R2P has failed significantly to reduce human suffering in any of the cases dealt with. The article notes that this clear failure does not seem to perturb the mainstream of academic R2P discourses, which, although critical at times, remain confident that R2P is making some difference and represents the best way forward. The article explores how this kind of discourse is propounded in the scholarly work on R2P. This leads us towards an argument that R2P as a discourse and international project can run in parallel with continuing mass suffering in African civil wars without being profoundly troubled. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates Rwanda’s agricultural policies and institutions as a historically contextualised response to exceptionally adverse developmental circumstances. Using the agrarian question as an analytical point of reference, the article argues that it is extremely difficult to identify how increases in productivity and income in smallholder agriculture can be achieved without forceful state action and a sustained injection of resources. In light of this, entirely right-congruent governance is caught in a dilemma about the extent to which the government overrides peasants’ own agency and the extent to which the agrarian strategy produces a sustained and stable transformation in agriculture. Rather than making a defence or condemnation of the government’s strategy, the article argues against pre-emptive judgements of an agrarian strategy that can only discernibly attain success over a long period. What the article does do is insist that there is development potential in the current strategy, not simply a disaster in the making. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Neoliberalism evokes images of a global project of intervention and social engineering. However complex that neoliberal project might be, at its core resides a desire to organise societies according to the expectations generated by liberal or neoclassical market modelling. With a few exceptions, most research on neoliberalism emphasises its 'dirtiness': neoliberalism in practice has been complex, sometimes contradictory, halting in its progress, and contested in its implementation. This means that evaluations of neoliberalism are frequently undermined by questions concerning the extent to which the abstract notions of liberalisation, property, and 'freedom' have been realised. The danger that this dispensation bequeaths is a tendency towards dualised evaluations of neoliberalism. On the one hand, writers start with the grand abstractions of neoliberalism in order to pursue idealist analyses: neoliberalism is working its way through the localisms and vernaculars of each and every society, almost as if the notion of neoliberalism has its own immanent agency. On the other hand, other (generally more recent) analyses focus on the 'dirtiness': the ways in which neoliberalism is rendered hopelessly complex, politicised, and subverted. The former's heuristic ambition is thwarted by an inability fully to encapsulate empirical realities; the latter's interest in 'realities' tends to lead towards empiricism or at least a loss of focus on the notion of a global market project. This article suggests a different way of understanding neoliberal intervention which does not try to resolve or mediate the aforementioned dualism as much as reconstitute the way we might understand neoliberalism. It does this by looking at the theory of pragmatism developed particularly by John Dewey. Dewey's attention to social practice, and his rejection of means-end or intentions-consequences distinctions leaves open to us a different intellectual field in which we can openly interpret social practices of market expansion. The article looks at the ways in which some African states - which have undergone intensive international intervention to promote neoliberal reform - might be understood through a pragmatist framework, and it is in this light that the concepts of repertoires, habits, and conduct are developed. The paper concludes that there is no universal and abstract 'neoliberal practice' of intervention, but that one can identify expanding or at least novel forms of social practice based in the international project to promote neoliberal reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the ways in which the British campaign coalition Make Poverty History represented Africa throughout 2005. Focusing particularly on the G8 Gleneagles summit, Make Poverty History (MPH) asserted a series of justice claims which had no geographical reference. Nevertheless, as a result of internal tensions within the coalition, and especially as a result of the ways in which MPH interacted with other political agencies as the summit approached, MPH’s messages became increasingly interpolated by references to Africa as a result of the emergence of government, media, and celebrity involvement. The result of this was that global poverty increasingly became an African issue. As 2005 became the ‘Year of Africa’, the justice messages that constituted MPH were largely effaced by the more familiar imperial legacy which represents Africa as a place of indigence in need of outside assistance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Sara Pantuliano on Misseriyya in Sudan, one by Peter Alexander and Aleksandra Gadzala on Africa's informal political economy, and one by Aleksandra Gadzala on the informal sector in Zambia.

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses an article about foreign direct investments (FDI) in Africa; another on the local state power reconstruction of Uganda, Burkina Faso, and Ghana; and the strategies of the government of Burkina Faso and Madagascar to reduce poverty.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Roger Southall on the fall of politician Thabo Mbeki, one by Susan Willett on the anti-corruption measures in Africa, and one by Sophie Harman on World Bank involvement in HIV/ AIDS policy.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one on the dynamics of the politics of post-crisis restoration in Nigeria, one on the role of students in social struggle and one on the trading regime between Africa and Europe.

This paper argues that the concept of the sovereign frontier can help us think about sovereignty and intervention in a way that moves beyond some of the limitations usually associated with the former concept. Focused on a zone of practice, embedded in a broader 'movement' of Western expansion, the sovereign frontier highlights political practices of subordination and incorporation that characterize the sway of intervention in contemporary African states. These concepts are sketched out with reference to more concrete practices of intervention in African states - especially 'governance states' - and critical commentary is drawn therefrom. The main argument here is that a series of ostensibly less intrusive forms of aid policy-making are enabled by a constitutive inequality within the sovereign frontier and work towards a more profound and effective projection of external power within it. The paper concludes by suggesting that the intrinsic expansiveness of the sovereign frontier offers few possibilities for the attainment of alternative sovereignties to those shaped by Western institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the abolition of the trade in African people to the plantation owners. He stated that the case contributed to the industrialization in Europe and made with reference to the imperatives of the market and the efficiency of the slave plantation system. He discussed the utilization of the transnational relations by the British abolitionist movement that is generated by the slave trade to argue the sharing of moral space of the people.

This article is interested in the nature of the neoliberal project's expansion in Africa. The starting point for this exploration is a need to reflect on how the concept of neoliberalism is defined, especially the way it signals an economic doctrine which can only be realised as a broader sociopolitical project. The article goes on to show how, inasmuch as neoliberalism has consolidated itself in African states, it has done so by expanding its boundaries from macroeconomic fundamentals into broader concerns of state reconstruction. Most profoundly the full realisation of neoliberal social transition relies on expectations about the way societies behave. Here neoliberal approaches reveal themselves as nothing so much as faith statements, or convictions about the market-like sociability of African communities. The article ends by reflecting on more historical and structuralist approaches to the way markets have evolved within societies, concluding with an entreaty to ‘bring accumulation back in’ as a way of understanding markets and their developmental possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the World Bank as a political thinker. This involves an interpretation of the values, methodologies, and theoretical references contained within the Bank's governance documentation. Generally, the Bank steers away from a serious engagement with the nature of states, or the dynamics of reform execution, even in its more detailed policy documents in reform areas such as administrative reform. But, by looking at the World Bank's involvement in African states, we can understand the ways in which the World Bank works with certain expectations concerning how reforms will work. The article critically analyses the Bank's‘political vision’ by comparing it with prominent theories of African politics. The article concludes that the World Bank's governance agenda misses three pivotal aspects of African politics: the unity of political and economic power, the extreme openness of African states to external pressures, and the salience of historically-embedded cultural and political relations. These three points directly raise important questions about the prospects of good governance reforms in Africa, and the involvement of the Bank therein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the mid-1990s, the World Bank has been exceptionally busy in Africa. A formerly-established relationship between the Bank and African states, best known as conditionality based structural adjustment lending, has been overlain with another reform agenda, perhaps best summarized as governance. The "architecture of governance" is a statement of the material dominance of the Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and it contains within it key moments of the Bank and IMF effective Bank veto. This article details the principal components of the governance architecture, largely constructed by the World Bank. The material basis for the construction of the governance architecture is the Highly Indebted Poor Countries scheme.

The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilisation lies unveiled before our eyes, moving from its home, where it assumes respectable form, to colonies, where it goes naked. Standards that most people would define as minimally acceptable have been a product of specific historical and material conditions: a result of the emergence of institutionally robust and interventionist states and the political demands of working classes. But, these historical conditions are part of the same conditions that produced very different states and economies in sub-Saharan Africa: colonial states of the scramble of the late 1880s are themselves part of the same capitalism which produced the civilisation that thinker Karl Marx ironically attributes to late Victorian England.

Investigates the importance of the political struggles in understanding politics in Africa. Role of political struggle in the political economy; Economic liberalization in the continent; Nature of African nationalism.

This article critically evaluates the nature of administrative reform in the context of conditionality and structural adjustment. Structural adjustment programmes constitute the broader environment and prioritisations within which donors and creditors support institutional reform. This raises the questions concerning the ownership and purpose of reform, especially if one bears in mind the substantial inequality of power between individual severely-indebted states and multilateral creditors which enjoy the alignment of many bilateral donors behind their prognoses. One can identify some of the contradictions that this relationship produces through an examination of Mozambique's experience with donors in respect to corruption and anticorruption strategies. Here, corruption constitutes part of the politics of adjustment, and the reforms which are to tackle it have to work on an institutional terrain which has already been subjected to the disintegrative effects of a decade of adjustment and minimally-controlled donor influence. All of this renders the idea - often at the base of much donor thinking concerning reform - of a stable and enlightened leadership motivated to implement rational/technical reform throughout government at best a simplification and at worst a misrepresentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces the November 2012 issue of the journal "New Political Economy" which focuses on the governance and development in Africa.

An introduction is presented in which the authors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including Mozambique follows global-historic framing of author Ndongo Sylla, the developmental governance in two of the examples of growth and transformation in Africa, and the importance of the social origins of governments.

This article explores the way that Africa has been represented within British political modernity through the representations of campaign organisations. Using a model of framing, campaigns are reviewed in terms of the ways that Africa is rendered diagnostically, prognostically and motivationally. In each case, one can identity a 'layering' within a single campaign tradition. This tradition is based in a Christian, liberal and humanitarian nationalism that emphasises notions and norms of good Britishness at least as much as it does specific realities in African spaces. As a result, representations of Africa within campaigns are 'domesticated' for national consumption. The article concludes by considering the prospects of this tradition in a period when development campaigning has become more globalised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]