In a context of globalization and liberalization, Africa is increasingly confronted with the commercialization of its space. Various large-scale actors, including international private investors, investor states, and local entrepreneurs, are constantly seeking to expand their land holdings for the production of food crops or biofuels. This article presents two Rwandan case studies and analyzes how large-scale land acquisition by foreign and local elite players affects local livelihoods. It identifies broader agrarian and social changes taking place in Rwanda and Africa and provides suggestions as to how the tables might be turned in order to protect local livelihoods in the further evolution of Rwanda’s agriculture.

Over the past two decades, attention in the social sciences increasingly has been drawn to the problem of violent civil conflicts, a problem that has disproportionately affected Africa more than any other region. Two approaches to this problem have come to dominate the field: attempts to understand the root causes of civil conflict and attempts to understand the dynamics of its violence. Critics of the former approach have elaborated the ways in which the etiological agenda itself makes, and then politically mobilizes, the reality it claims to find. The goal of this article is to elaborate a similar critique for the latter agenda by examining the productive and destructive interaction between theoretical assumptions and empirical realities that have informed attempts to understand the Algerian massacres of the late 1990s. The overall intention is not to promote a new understanding of those atrocities. Rather, it is to gain a deeper insight into the processes by which episodes of mass civil violence become objects of scientific analysis—and thus objects for political utilization—despite their having emerged from an empirical milieu of contested, ambiguous, and indeterminate realities.

This article analyzes the value chain for Chinese manufactured goods such as garments and textiles sold in sub-Saharan Africa. It explores the opportunities for Africans with small, private businesses in the export trade from China, the potential for long-term business development, and how strategies of engagement have changed over time. It finds that the value chains for low-cost goods vary. There is great diversity of entry levels and opportunities for socioeconomic mobility, and traders evolve diverse strategies to obtain and defend their position in the chain. These findings are discussed in terms of understandings of international value chains, the informal economy, and African economic development strategies.

This article examines the impact of Chinese textile imports on the organization and politics of women’s textile trading networks in Benin. The incursion of cheap Chinese textiles into markets formerly dominated by imported European fabrics has shifted the balance of power between networks of traders in Benin’s textile market, reconfiguring relations between textile traders, state officials, and international companies. Focusing on political and economic dimensions of trading networks, the article reveals how global linkages transform local economic networks and how local actors structure networks for global economic partners. Far from bypassing state actors, this process is shown to incorporate state officials from above and from below, splintering established trading networks and weaving new ones from emerging configurations of traders, state officials, and global textile exporters.

Over the last decade, the bottom-of-the-pyramid (BoP) approach has gained prominence as a tool of “inclusive” capitalism in sub-Saharan Africa. This approach reframes development as a seamless outcome of core business activities, one that can ameliorate poverty by bringing much-needed products and services to the poor and generating employment opportunities for informal and subsistence workers as “micro-entrepreneurs.” Yet while transnational capital has set its sights on Africa’s “underserved” yet potentially buoyant markets, BoP initiatives do more than seize upon the entrepreneurial talent and aspirations of Africa’s informal economies. This article argues, rather, that these initiatives create BoP economies through a set of market technologies, practices, and discourses that render the spaces and actors at the bottom of the pyramid knowable, calculable, and predictable to global business. The article describes how these technologies extend new forms of market governance over the informal poor, reconfiguring their habits, social practices, and economic strategies under the banner of poverty reduction.

This article investigates the Taveta Road phenomenon, whereby women garment informal traders occupy a whole street in the central business district in Nairobi, Kenya. It also discusses the implications for urban planning of the presence of women informal traders in the central business district. The article demonstrates that the ability of these traders to move from the margins into the heart of the city is based on their ability to cross borders, organize collectively, and develop entrepreneurial skills that make use of social networks, group agency, and personal initiative. It also illustrates that over time, their gradual encroachment has led to an acceptance of their presence and their integration into the urban economy. These developments—which are referred to as “subaltern urbanism” or “solidarity entrepreneurialism”—have far-reaching implications in terms of the traders’ relationship with the city, state laws, and the national economy.

This article furthers our understanding of how state and citizens interact to produce local institutions and examines the effects of these processes. It brings critical institutional theory into engagement with ideas about everyday governance to analyze how hybrid arrangements are formed through bricolage. Such a perspective helps us to understand governance arrangements as both negotiated and structured, benefiting some and disadvantaging others. To explore these points the article tracks the evolution of the Sungusungu, a hybrid pastoralist security institution in the Usangu Plains, Tanzania. It also considers the wider implications of such hybrid arrangements for livelihoods, social inclusion, distributive justice, and citizenship.

In January 2012 a broad spectrum of popular groups staged an unprecedented protest against the removal of what has been termed a “subsidy” on fuel prices by the Nigerian government. The participation of tailors in this national political event suggests that self-employed artisans were prepared to transcend their narrow nonpolitical agenda to promote their interests and demands for decent social and economic conditions. Interviews with participating organization representatives in Lagos indicate the supportive role of alliances with labor unions and organized informal workers at large. We see current global developments in the textile industry as conducive to this outcome.

This article examines processes of economic inclusion in divided societies, with a focus on both religious and formal–informal divides. Drawing on recent fieldwork in the northern Nigerian cities of Kano and Kaduna, the article challenges the assumption that identity-based informal organization intensifies violent social divisions, and that taxation and linkages with the state foster more stable and inclusive governance. A range of informal sector activities provides insights into escalating religious conflict and uneven patterns of formal inclusion in interreligious relations. Attention is focused on the relative role of informal institutions and formal interventions such as taxation in diffusing or exacerbating conflict at the grassroots level.