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In the context of the global recession of democracy, this article engages with sub-Saharan Africa's so-called 'democratic' deficit. Three arguments are presented. First, sub-Saharan Africa's challenge is less a democratic deficit than it is a liberal deficit. The political elite are content to use the electoral mechanism to gain access to power but are thereafter resistant to restraints on that power. Second, organised civil society can contribute to addressing this deficit by contending for civil liberties and holding political authority accountable. Third, sub-Saharan Africa's deeply religious society can contribute towards the development of such a civil society. The study engages with secondary data analysis using survey data from Afrobarometer to determine sub-Saharan Africa's 'deficit' and whether religion can contribute to the development of civil society in the region. From the survey data it was found that citizens of sub-Saharan African countries understand democracy in its liberal form – ensuring civil liberties and personal freedoms. Furthermore, it was noted that those who are religious are more likely to be civically engaged than those who are unaffiliated, and in time, this can contribute to addressing the liberal deficit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Development practitioners and agencies consider sport to play a valuable role in social development; however, the emerging evidence does not yet adequately describe sport's contribution to social development. Lyras (2009, 2012a) proposed a sport for development theory (SFDT) as a specific model to increase understanding of the processes and conditions involved in sport for development (SFD) programs. In our study, SFD practitioners of the Kicking AIDS Out Network were interviewed to identify project elements perceived as significant for achieving development objectives, and their perceptions were examined in relation to SFDT to test its applicability to their particular development context. The findings suggest SFDT offers an appropriate framework to enhance project design and delivery that integrates the features of sport, education, life skills development, use of leaders as change agents, and participation that are key to Kicking AIDS Out programs and other community sport programs promoting behavior and social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that institutional corruption is the central governance dilemma in Africa by examining the causes, outcome, and origins of the 1996-97 Tanzania coffee crisis. It shows how the growth and crash of a coffee price bubble became a harbinger for defining corruption as historically embedded institutional tendencies and advantages, instead of acts of individual malfeasance. Institutional corruption highlights political gains from the use of public resources in the form of political influence over producer prices, concentrated market power, and centralized policymaking for the wealthy and politically connected, as opposed to personal gains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines Kwame Gyekye's defense of commitmental moral revolution as a solution to the problem of political corruption in postcolonial Africa. In his book; Tradition and Modernity, Gyekye argues that the problem of political corruption in Africa can mainly be solved by commitmental moral revolution. However, there is a fundamental worry about the applicability of this proposal. The worry is that despite Gyekye's suggested solution, why is it that the problem of political corruption still persists in Africa on a large-scale? Is this persistence of political corruption in postcolonial Africa not a refutation of Gyekye's main claim? This paper provides answers to these questions. The paper identifies the reason why Gyekye's suggested solution may be ineffective in postcolonial Africa. It argues that the problem of political corruption in Africa (Nigeria to be specific) is a function of social acceptability of the phenomenon. Primarily, the paper intends to achieve two main objectives. First, to critically assess Gyekye's commitmental moral revolution, and also, to argue that failure to address the question of social acceptability of corruption in Africa, Gyekye's suggested solution to corruption may continue to be of no effect. The paper concludes that commitmental moral revolution is necessary but not sufficient in addressing the problem of political corruption in postcolonial Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Big Man has attracted considerable attention from social scientists, both as an explanatory force as well as a phenomenon to be explained. But the concept has become unmoored from its original meaning. Once used to refer to an apex figure within a patrimonial regime, today Big Men are often described as dictators or thieves. I show this using an original dataset covering discussions of Big Men in leading African Studies journals since 1980. I find that authors, especially political scientists, overemphasise theft and underemphasise accountability of Big Men. Then, drawing on my research with Ghanaian local politicians, I show how Big Men are constantly under pressure from their supporters. The paper concludes with a modest call to put the Big Man back in his place as powerful but also empowered, and thus indebted, to those beneath him. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-national research on African electoral politics has argued that competition increases the prospects for pre-election violence. However, there is a dearth of systematic research on the effect of political competition on pre-election violence at the subnational level. We theorize that in African democracies characterized by competition at the national level but low subnational competitiveness (polarization), violence is often a manifestation of turf war and a tool to maintain and disrupt political territorial control. Consequently, contrary to expectations derived from the cross-national literature, pre-election violence is more likely in uncompetitive than competitive constituencies. Locally dominant as well as locally weak parties have incentives to perpetrate violence in uncompetitive constituencies. For locally dominant parties, violence is a tool to shrink the democratic space in their strongholds and maintain territorial control. For locally weak parties, violence can disturb the dominance of the opponent and protect their presence in hostile territory. We hypothesize that pre-election violence will be particularly common in opposition strongholds. In such locations, ruling parties can leverage their superior repressive resources to defend their ability to campaign, while the opposition can use their local capacity to reinforce the politics of territoriality. We test our hypotheses with original constituency-level election violence data from the 2016 Zambian elections. Data come from expert surveys of domestic election observers and represent a novel way of measuring low-level variations in election violence. Our analysis shows patterns of pre-election violence consistent with our theory on pre-election violence as a territorial tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A considerable literature examines the effect of voter information on candidate strategies and voter–politician interactions in the developing world. The voter information literature argues that information can improve accountability because more informed voters are harder to woo with traditional campaign tools, such as ethnic appeals and vote-buying. However, this literature has largely ignored the reaction of political candidates and thus may reach conclusions that are overly optimistic regarding the impact of information on electoral accountability. We argue that voter information can increase electoral violence in developing countries where politicians face fewer institutional constraints on their campaign tactics. When violence is used as a campaign strategy, more informed electorates are more at risk because they are harder to sway through alternative campaign techniques. Using data from 35 African countries, we show that respondents receiving their news predominantly from newspapers are a good proxy for informed voters because they differ in terms of their political attitudes from respondents consuming no news or receiving it via other channels. Combining the geo-coded survey data with pre-electoral violence event data, we find a robust positive association between newspaper readership and fear of and exposure to campaign violence. This finding contributes to the micro-foundations of election violence and adds a cautionary note for voter information programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do class divisions and fear of redistribution impede political transitions? This article argues that tensions over economic redistribution in European settler colonies caused resisted enfranchisement and liberation wars in colonial Africa. It offers three main contributions. First, it identifies key scope conditions for redistributive transition models: in African settler colonies, the European elite monopolized the best agricultural land and could only secure their economic advantages by repressing majority rule—also incentivizing liberation wars. Second, it exploits a novel research design to assess redistributive theories. Statistical evidence from Africa during the decolonization era demonstrates that larger European settler population shares covary with smaller franchises and with more frequent colonial liberation wars. To account for the endogeneity of European settlement, the article introduces an instrument that measures climatic and other land suitability factors that affected where Europeans could settle. Third, it explains divergent decolonization paths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on electoral violence has focused on its causes as well as its scope, ignoring the implications for citizens trying to practice their political citizenship. Informed citizens are a central part of a functioning democracy. The emotive response to violence may play an important role here. This article contributes to a deeper understanding of how the voter responds to violence. Recent work on the role of emotions in politics has demonstrated its positive role for cognition, as fear can increase the individual’s propensity to amass information and reevaluate attitudes and behavior. This is tested in a hitherto unexamined context, namely, Sub-Saharan Africa, using the Afrobarometer survey (20 different countries). In general, political fear is a significant predictor of political knowledge, but in the opposite direction compared to the hypothesis. The affective intelligence hypothesis only receives partial support using this data, namely, in countries with high levels of political violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal changes in the 1990s resulted in greater pluralism in African media, particularly FM radio. Theorists have long argued that media freedoms are necessary for democratic development, but effects on individual-level orientations and behaviors have not been fully explored. Specifically, there has been limited work on the effects of radio exposure on political participation in Africa, and individuals’ self-selection of the media they consume complicates the measurement of causal effects. However, the fact that access to FM radio signals is largely exogenously determined provides a possible identification strategy. Here, data on station technicalities and local topography are used to predict FM propagation in Uganda soon after the implementation of media liberalization. Analyses of results from an Afrobarometer survey demonstrate that radio exposure is significantly associated with higher self-reported political participation. With regard to mechanisms, there is no evidence that exposure is associated with significantly greater efficacy, interest in politics, attitudinal extremism, or perceptions about distributional politics or violence, but those who listened to the radio with greater frequency were more knowledgeable about politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bad governance can very quickly ruin the economic situation of the whole country. However, in the conditions of the Western world, even though they can cause a lot of damage, more or less developed administrative apparatus is able to minimize the effects of bad decisions, and the society has a chance to rebuff the rulers in the next elections. In so-called dysfunctional states bad governance can damage an already weak country's economy. Most researchers dealing with the issue of the state in Sub-Saharan Africa believe that, once the decolonisation was over, the power in the region was mostly taken by people whose leadership must be evaluated negatively, represented by such dictators as Jean-Bédel Bokassa, Mobutu Sese Seko or Idi Amin. The paper is trying to explain the interconnection between bad governance experienced by Sub-Saharan African countries and state dysfunctionality phenomenon from which they suffer. The author formulated the analysis and assessment of bad governance presented in this article on the basis of his own field studies carried out in African countries and research of specialist literature related to African and political studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turkey has maintained its strategic relations with Africa at the highest level under recent AK Party governments in the field not only of low politics but also of high politics. For example, it opened its largest overseas military base in Somalia in 2017 and signed military, defense and security pacts with more than 25 African countries. This article traces the deep historical and cultural relations with Africa behind its newly evolving foreign policy identity, arguing that its booming economic power has been a significant driving force in shaping a new security strategy. It examines what the growing security involvement means for both Turkey and Africa in order to contribute to the relevant literature through a holistic approach from both theoretical and conceptual perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authoritarian resilience is not only a function of a state's domestic politics. International relations also may provide much support when authoritarian governments need it most. In the case of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe and the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) relied on support from neighboring states in the Southern African Development Community (SADC), including a permissive South Africa, despite severely flawed elections in 2002, 2008, and 2013. Why have neighboring states often turned a blind eye to electoral abuses in Zimbabwe? Our main argument is that Zimbabwe's neighbors are complicit in allowing the erosion of democracy in Zimbabwe because political incumbents across Southern Africa give priority to ruling-group survival. In this instance, the domestic imperative of political survival is underpinned by a collective international norm of political solidarity that originated in a shared, formative experience of national liberation struggles against white settler colonialism. Resulting ruling-group solidarity has been a strong enough force to trump a ruling group's material interests. To sustain their support of ZANU-PF, the governments of Southern Africa have been willing to incur considerable costs in the form of reduced investment opportunities, impeded trade, unpaid public debts, and a burdensome flood of refugees and migrants. The concept of ruling-group solidarity helps explain an important mechanism that contributes to democracy prevention, particularly in the Southern African context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is the traditional logic by which violent conflict fosters long-run political development universal? To help address this question, this article compares Europe with China. While historical warfare was very common across both units, representative government flourished only in Europe. We suggest that the relationship between violent conflict and political development depends on the underlying political geography context. In Europe, political fragmentation was rampant. Thus, conflict tended to be external (i.e., interstate), and attack threats were multidirectional. Furthermore, exit ability was high in this context. Elites were therefore in a strong bargaining position to demand political representation in return for new tax revenue. China, by contrast, was politically centralized. Here, conflict tended to be internal, attack threats were unidirectional, and exit ability was low. The emperor was thus powerful enough to extract tax funds without surrendering political control. In this context, violent conflict promoted autocratic re-entrenchment. We conclude by briefly analyzing the relationships between political geography, historical conflict, and political development in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on connections between France's May ’68 and political and social movements in Francophone Africa: Guinea, the Congo, Senegal, and Madagascar. As participants challenged their common postcolonial situation, these movements converged around the importance of youth and alliances between students, workers, and "the masses." The article describes the emergence of French and African activist communities defined by a common habitus constituted by shared techniques of protest and responses to repression, academic exchanges, common interests, and reading. The purpose of the article is to examine the circulation of ideas and people through the "long 1968"—from South to North and vice versa—and to situate May '68 within the broad range of expectations that the end of empire both raised and often disappointed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The developing world currently loses more money via capital flight than it receives through foreign aid and foreign direct investment combined. This "leakage" of capital produces many pernicious consequences for developing economies. What factors influence capital flight? I argue that it follows an electoral cycle. Greater uncertainty prior to elections incentivizes those in the business sector to take their money elsewhere. Using data from thirty-six African countries from 1971 to 2009, I find support for my argument: capital flight is higher during election years than it is otherwise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African states are increasingly leveraging the power of telecom operators to advance goals that the state itself struggles to secure (e.g. security and fiscal goals). This suggests a paradigmatic shift in African politics, whereby telecom operators have become a face of the state, exerting agency over state and citizen in pervasive and sometimes unexpected ways. However, their structural implications for African politics are lamentably under-theorized. Inspired by Marshall McLuhan's maxim, "the medium is the message," this paper examines MTN's operations in Nigeria and Rwanda to expose the double-edged nature of this new structural dynamic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the transitions to multipartyism that began in the late 1980s, presidential term limits were adopted into the constitutions of a majority of sub-Saharan African states. Yet, a sizable minority of African governments resisted implementing such restrictions on executive power. How can this variation be explained? This article proposes an expanded strategic choice approach that posits that the degree of electoral uncertainty affects institutional choice in cases of controlled, unilateral constitutional revisions (which were common across Africa) just as much as it shapes institutional choice in situations of cooperative constitution-making through bargaining and pact-making. Based on this logic, I argue that term limits were adopted as an electoral insurance mechanism in all cases where constitutional drafters perceive the degree of future electoral uncertainty to be high, regardless of whether the constitutional review process is cooperative or controlled. Alternatively, term limits are eschewed in cases where one unified party fully controls the constitutional review process and also perceives that they will win elections into the foreseeable future. The argument is tested through a statistical analysis of the determinants of term limit choice across all relevant sub-Saharan cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a study of how militant youths in Sub-Saharan African conflict areas reintegrated into civilian life after they were granted Amnesty. Specifically, the study explored what reintegration means to different segments of the society and how the amnesty programs fit these descriptions,the extent to which the ex-militants are reintegrated into civilian life socially, economically and politically, the contextual factors that make reintegration difficult and how the different forms of capital acquired by the ex-militants during and after the crisis have transformed. The area of study was the oil rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria where sixty ex-militants and eighteen community leaders from Ijaw, Urhobo and Itshekiri ethnic groups were selected for the study. Questionnaire, interviews and focus group discussions were employed to generate the needed data. Findings revealed that the way the reintegration package was carried out fell short of what the ex-militants and the communities perceive reintegration to be. As a result, the ex-militants have not been effectively reintegrated into civilian life. Factors such as failure to address the cause and effects of the conflict, alienation of the communities in the amnesty program and inability to find substitutes for the ex-militants hindered effective reintegration. Meanwhile, the different forms of capital acquired by the ex-militants have undergone some transformation much of which was used for clandestine activities. The study recommends that reintegration exercise should be based on the context that produced the conflict and that communities should be directly involved in its design and implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the effects of territorial government fragmentation on the quality of public services. We argue that an increase in the number of regional governments has two effects: (1) it redistributes fiscal and administrative resources to underserved regions and (2) encourages yardstick competition. Extreme government fragmentation, however, limits efficiency gains by reducing administrative capacity, economies of scale, and enabling capture. We test this argument using original data on the number of regional governments in sub-Saharan Africa (1960-2012). Consistent with our theoretical expectations, we find robust evidence for an initial increase in the quality of services provision following regional government splits, which levels off at high levels of regional fragmentation. Three distinct difference-in-difference analyses of microlevel, georeferenced data on health outcomes in Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda further support our theoretical argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the effect of globalization on governance in 51 African countries for the period 1996–2011. Four bundled governance indicators and four globalization (political, economic, social, and general) variables are used. The empirical evidence is based on instrumental variable quantile regressions. The motivation for using this estimation technique is that blanket governance - globalization policies are not likely to succeed unless they are contingent on initial levels of governance and tailored differently across countries with low, intermediate, and high levels of governance. The following findings are presented. First, globalization does, in fact, appear to promote good governance. Second, for the most part, the effect of globalization is higher in terms of magnitude in the bottom quantiles of the political, institutional, and general governance distributions. Third, the impact of globalization is overwhelmingly higher in terms of magnitude in the top quantiles of the economic governance distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Southern Africa has experienced highs and lows in its efforts towards democratisation. Following political independence of Southern Africa states, the germination of democratisation was a rather slow process. A brief period of multi-party democracy introduced through pre-independence elections quickly dissipated and was replaced by one-party, one-person and, in some instances, military regimes. This era also coincided with the height of the Cold War globally and the heyday of apartheid in which inter-state conflicts had intensified. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, a new dispensation has emerged wherein multi-party democracy has re-emerged in the context of the post-Cold War and post-apartheid dispensation, marked by relative peace dividend. However, democratisation in Southern Africa remains a mixed bag today. Some countries have not yet experienced the democratic transition. Others have managed to transition from one-party, one-person and military regimes to multi-party democracies. In various others, there are signs of reversal of democratic gains. This paper reviews the state of democratisation in Southern Africa with a view to understand why the regional record is so uneven across countries that form the Southern African Development Community (SADC). While the article presents a regional snapshot, it also presents comparative insights from Botswana and Lesotho. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We investigate whether mining affects local corruption in Africa. Several cross-country analyses report that natural resources have adverse effects on political institutions by increasing corruption, whereas other country-level studies show no evidence of such 'political resource curses.' These studies face well-known endogeneity and other methodological issues, and employing micro-level data would allow for drawing stronger inferences. Hence, we connect 92,762 Afrobarometer survey respondents to spatial data on 496 industrial mines. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that mining increases bribe payments, and this result is robust to using alternative models. Mines are initially located in less corrupt areas, but mining areas turn more corrupt after mines open. When exploring mechanisms, we find that local economic activity relates differently to corruption in mining and non-mining areas, suggesting that mining income incentivizes and enables local officials already present to require more bribes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strengthening citizen participation in West Africa is an increasingly important aspect of democratic development – especially in mitigating setbacks arising from poor governance. This article uses Round 4 Afrobarometer data to explore what stimulates local-level participation by examining determinants against the backdrop of eight West African nations: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Ghana, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria, and Senegal. Using a negative binomial regression model, our results are evaluated within the framework of good governance, and show that local context, specifically relative to citizens’ perceptions of and attitudes about the performance of local government, matters when it comes to local political participation. Points for practitioners This study provides public administrators with a framework for understanding what drives local-level, non-electoral citizen participation in West Africa, and helps them understand how to increase local citizen engagement and build a more democratic society through the pursuit of good governance principles. In addition, this study highlights the critical importance of local government performance, and the role of citizens’ attitudes and evaluations, in local civic engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In sub-Saharan African (SSA) cities like Maputo, land commodification is predictably fueled by plans for aspirational infrastructure serving elites. What is rather more peculiar, however, is the way in which the promotion of some fiscal policy reforms can also inadvertently support land commodification and the uneven development it (re)produces. This article describes how efforts to host both democratic fiscal reforms (via localized exercises like participatory budgeting) and to tap into international capital circuits to stir economic development (via aspirational infrastructure and urban redevelopment plans) can produce a Sisyphean dilemma. While gains in ordinary infrastructure investments (e.g. wells, water pumps) were achieved democratically in Maputo's KaTembe district with the participatory budget, these material (and political) improvements have been rendered irrelevant by better funded aspirational infrastructure projects for KaTembe (e.g. bridges, high-rise residential buildings, tourist facilities) supported by more opaque decisions made by the national government without residential input. Given the wide embrace of participatory budgeting in contexts of weak democracy across SSA cities and elsewhere, Maputo's experience serves as a timely alert of the risks run when this popular exercise is prematurely promoted, especially when wider-scaled property tax reforms could better redress uneven and undemocratic urban development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effects of truth and reconciliation commissions and peace committees on popular perceptions of the judicial systems of Africa. Using data from the Afrobarometer, and conducting mixed effects quantitative analysis, we test whether or not the use of truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) and peace committees led to greater popular trust in the courts. We find both cross-nationally, sub-nationally, and over time, the use of TRCs has not led to greater trust in courts (as is often claimed by its advocates), but find some support for the notion that they detract from trust in the judiciary. We suggest this is because such institutions have been established to compete with existing judicial practices, rather than complement and enhance them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative literature has long defined itself as interdisciplinary, intercultural, and interlingual. These traits have led some to criticize the discipline as lacking discipline. Yet indiscipline--not to mention the intercultural, interlingual, and interdisciplinary--is a matter of perspective; in many ways, comparative literature is highly disciplined. So how then to break discipline more thoroughly? This article engages in one approach--incorporating literature into a wider range of global history and other scholarly discussions of transregional/global processes. The focus is Africa-China relationships. Integral to China's rapid rise as a world power have been its global initiatives and investments. These are most pronounced in Africa, where in many nations the financial, military, and political connections with China now run exceptionally deep. The human dimensions of Africa-China contact are just as complex, but unlike other types of contact they remain woefully understudied. African artistic engagement with China and Chinese artistic engagement with Africa enhance our understandings of these interconnections. But rather than simply exposing and then either affirming or dismantling stereotypes, many Chinese and African creative works across the centuries are more nuanced. This literary engagement provides valuable perspectives on some of today's most controversial and anxiety producing transregional dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reviews five important recent books on party system institutionalization, party collapse and party building. The first section analyses broader lessons about party system institutionalization derived from these books. What have we learned about how party system institutionalization varies over time and space and about its causes? All five volumes underscore the difficulty of institutionalizing democratic party systems in contemporary Asia, Africa and Latin America. At the same time, they demonstrate that there have been some successful cases of party building and party system institutionalization. In all three regions, variance across countries is great. The three books on Latin America show that sharp conflict and programmatic differences are good for institutionalization, partially countering earlier arguments about the perils of polarization. Across regions, erstwhile authoritarian ruling parties have sometimes helped to forge institutionalized party systems under competitive regimes. The rest of the essay analyses the three single-authored books in some detail and provides brief overviews of the two edited volumes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does cabinet size have an impact on economic policy in Africa? The average number of ministers has increased steadily for four decades, yet we know little about the economic effects of new portfolios, despite popular complaints about costly cabinets. Comparative studies generate conflicting expectations, either blaming coalition governments for patronage or crediting them with economic restraint. Using data on 45 Sub-Saharan African countries between 1971 and 2006, our empirical analysis links parties and portfolios to budgetary policy performance. We show that cabinets with more ministries are associated with budget surpluses, but they are also slightly more likely to engage in patronage spending. Next, we find that cabinets governing through multiparty coalitions have no consistent impact on budget surpluses. However, they are strongly associated with less extractive government and lower rates of patronage spending compared with single-party cabinets. These results hold after controlling for the type of colonial legacy, economic conditions, population size, constraints on executives, level of democracy, oil income, type of party system and ethnic and religious fractionalization. We conclude that parties and portfolios are both important but they have different effects: adding portfolios to the cabinet may improve economic outcomes by enhancing specialization, but governance through multiparty cabinets generates incentives to both limit extraction and restrain patronage spending. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss various reports within the issue including politics and surveillance in Africa, a comparative study of the private security industry in Kenya and South Africa and the international efforts to build local security in Senegal.

This article explores how language policy affects the socioeconomic development of nation states through two channels: the individual’s exposure to and (in reference to an individual’s mother tongue) linguistic distance from the official language. In a cross-country framework the article first establishes a robust and sizeable negative relationship between an official language that is distant from the local indigenous languages and proxies for human capital and health. To establish this relationship as causal, we instrument language choice with a measure of geographic distance from the origins of writing. Next, using individual level data from India and a set of 11 African countries, we provide microempirical support on the two channels—distance from and exposure to the official language—and their implications for educational, health, occupational and wealth outcomes. Finally, we suggest policy implications based on our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reports on conflict over term limits in Africa. It mentions that most countries in the continent scrapped it including South Sudan, Uganda as well as the Republic of Congo wherein their presidents were re-elected. An overview of the perspective of European Union (EU) High Representative Federica Mogherini on its benefits is also presented.

This paper is a preliminary reflection on China’s domestic development and its aid presence in Africa. “Development” had its day before the 1970s but then encountered de-constructive and re-constructive critics in the field of Development Anthropology. China’s conceptualization of development has not only drawn a lot from Western development discourse but also evolved with its own features, which deserve a critical reflection in terms of an “elusive discourse” and the “practical pursuit of welfare”, a seemingly paradoxical dichotomy. It follows with China’s foreign assistance or aid presence in Africa, which, the author holds, is imprinted with China’s development practice concepts and illustrated by a case of Chinese development aid in Ethiopia. The paper eventually discusses the would-be roles of Chinese anthropologists, who have been surprisingly absent in recent years, in contrast to Western academia’s intellectual tradition of widely reflecting development issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In democratic Africa, where ethnicity is a key driver of vote choice, politicians must attract voters across ethnic lines. This article explores one way politicians can do this: by appealing to a coethnic bond through their spouse. We propose that cross-ethnic spouses can help candidates send credible signals of coalition building before an election. We test this argument with a survey experiment in Benin, where President Yayi has married across ethnic lines. Our results confirm that priming the first lady’s ethnicity increases support for President Yayi among her coethnics. We generalize these results by combining new data on leader-spouse ethnicity with Afrobarometer survey data. Our results suggest that cross-ethnic marriages are one tool leaders can use to shore up support in multiethnic elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As well as a site of politics and public health action, the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa has been a focus of media representations. This paper examines print media narratives around border control in relation to Ebola in the UK, the USA and Australia from the start of the epidemic to May 2015. It shows that Ebola became mobilised as a frame through which domestic politics could be discussed. The disease was transformed from a problem for West Africa to a problem for the West. The context of West Africa and affected populations was homogenised and hidden. The focus of reporting centred upon domestic political actions and more local sources of threat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the significance of the Africa Command (AFRICOM), one of nine unified combatant commands of the U.S. Armed Forces that is responsible for military operations and military relations with 53 African nations, in the nation's transformational diplomacy. It looks at the history of the relations between the U.S. and Africa from the Barbary Wars of the early 19th century to the onset of the Cold War, during which the Navy was engaged in Africa in pursuit of commercial, humanitarian trade and strategic interests. It aslo explores President George Bush's decision behind the establishment of AFRICOM, and the reorganization of its command structure between 2007 and 2008.

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