The Mozambican Land Law of 1997 intends to provide flexible rules of access to land, while securing local people's customary rights, as well as equal rights for women and men. Drawing on participant observation during a ‘land delimitation’ process in central Mozambique, this article analyses the complex negotiation ensuing from the implementation of the Land Law in a local community. It shows how the delimitation process provided spaces for asserting – male – roles of power and authority, while local women were increasingly marginalised in the process. By presenting oral testimonies from women in the community, the authors seek to balance the account, providing women's perspectives on the highly gendered character of interests in, access to, and exclusion from land. The analysis ends with the question: What would be required to provide a space for local women to articulate their interests in a secure access to land during the delimitation process itself?

Drawing on empirical evidence from Yei River County in South Sudan, this paper argues that, rather than a temporary phenomenon, displacement may lead to a drastic reorganisation of land occupation and governance. Such reorganisation may become strongly connected to broader political contention. In the case of Yei, existing legal frameworks and institutions are inadequate to deal with land conflicts resulting from massive displacement and return. Crucially, historical grievances result in the displaced no longer being perceived as powerless victims, but as agents of a Dinka agenda to (re)occupy territories in Equatoria, and as perpetrators in land conflict. Such politics of land-control and identity may turn land disputes between displaced people and returnees into a major source of instability. At the same time, those displaced people who are not well-connected politically may lose their land rights.

This author made her first study of the Muslim brotherhoods in 1966, and then ten years later reassessed their political position.1 Now, after almost a similar length of time since 1976, this brief evaluation is written in the hope of illustrating the gradually changing position of Muslim leaders or marabouts, and their rôle in Senegalese life and politics.

In modern African political literature there is a recurrent reference to the dangers of ‘balkanisation’. Already during the 1920s the Gold Coast nationalist Kobina Sekyi compared Africa with the Balkans, and warned not to follow the ways of ‘balkanisation’ Later Kwame Nkrumah, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Sékou Touré, and other anti-colonial leaders continued to employ the term which rapidly became a basic part of the phraseology of modern African nationalism. I shall attempt to analyse the concept, and to show its use, definition, ambivalence, and implications.

The transformation of the South African Public Service into a bureaucracy that is broadly representative of the population is one of the most significant public sector reforms to occur since the end of apartheid. Grounded in the theory of representative bureaucracy, this study examines demographic representation in the South African Public Service and how it impacts the organisational effectiveness of national departments. The empirical analysis is based on longitudinal data from 60 national departments from 2006 to 2013. The findings show that as these organisations become more representative by hiring a higher per cent of Africans, of Coloureds, and of Indians, they achieve a higher per cent of goals. The findings for gender representation are more mixed and show that female representation among most racial groups is unrelated to organisational effectiveness.

Today's African political class is much more diverse in character and aspiration than the one that overcame colonial rule and inaugurated independent governments. Sons of early liberation leaders now jostle for power in a few countries (Chad, Kenya), descendants of successful autocrats perpetuate family rule in others (Gabon), several long-serving hegemons remain in control after decades in office (as in Cameroon, Djibouti, Rwanda and Uganda), a clutch of kleptocrats continue to defraud citizens (as in Equatorial Guinea and Zimbabwe), upstart soldiers oust elected placeholders (Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali), and here and there democratic stalwarts (Botswana, Ghana, Malawi, Senegal, South Africa, Zambia) are delivering authentic, uplifting, leadership to their followers.

African states and studies are in a profound period of revisionism as the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s yields to the ‘adjustment reforms’ of the 1990s. The relative optimism and expansion of the initial years of independence have long since been superseded by pessimism and contraction as successive energy, drought, debt, and devaluation shocks have resulted in impoverishment and inequalities. The former has affected ‘vulnerable groups’ in particular – women, children, elderly and peripheral communities1 – while the latter has occurred both within and between states. A few classes and countries have thrived despite or because of the continental crisis – more bourgeois fractions and more informal sectors on the one hand and, on the other, Botswana, Mauritius, and Zimbabwe. Africa at the end of the 1990s will likely be more marginal, vulnerable, and unequal than ever, as indicated in the final section, hardly the revolutionary, nationalist scenario anticipated after World War II, but more realistic and realisable none the less.2

The political revolution of contemporary Africa has so far largely been limited to the centre and to re-establishing the same institutional forms and processes which failed Africa in the 1960s. These regimes are already showing signs of erosion. This problem can be understood through the theory of public goods. Key collective or ‘public’ goods problems impede the collective action necessary for institutional development. Top-down strategies cannot surmount these problems because they cannot integrate and unify the population or structure consensual and sustained collective action.

As currently constituted, national levels of government in Africa will be poor partners with local communities in development, be it of democracy or of the economy. In many cases, national regimes only exist at all because minimal contributing sets or political monopolists controlled, were given, or mobilised the resources to establish constituting rule systems which they used to sustain their existing relative advantages during the break-up of imperial systems. As this advantage is usually at the expense of the majority which lives outside the capitals, resources and policies to improve these areas are slow in coming. The slow, bottom-up process by which a true public constitution is built, one which reflects and elaborates generally held values, is built on existing political relationships, and protects social diversity, has never been allowed to develop.

Refounding the African state must resolve these problems if it is to succeed. Ethnically and religiously diverse peoples will rule themselves better under federal and consociational systems which give local leaders space to lead local institutional development, authority to play a role in national governance, a process to develop consensus on central policy and to check the centre when there is no consensus. This requires a foundation of viable, real, developed structures of local governance if it is to succeed.

This paper provides a framework-based approach for assessing the potential for mobile finance (m-finance) services to achieve greater financial inclusion in sub-Saharan Africa. The conceptual approach synthesises market and user perspectives, and constructs an evidence-based exploratory framework based on analysis of a single country, Uganda. Case evidence is used to inform four lifecycle stages for m-finance, moving from design to access, usage, and outcomes associated with differentiated m-finance applications. Based on analysis of published sources, findings from Uganda suggest that early adoption of m-finance has favoured those already financially included and market-driven solutions for the financially excluded are limited. Simple market modelling is found to be an insufficient basis on which to assess potential amongst the unbanked majority. The paper argues that the perception, behaviour and capability of users, and forms of user appropriation, should be a paramount concern, and potential for m-finance should be considered within a deeper understanding of a specified financial services context and within a defined market, regulatory and policy environment.

This article examines the relationship between the politics of ethnicity and road construction in Hawassa, Ethiopia. The Ethiopian state has recently invested unprecedented amounts of money in the construction of urban roads. These roads both undermine and reinforce longstanding ethnic hierarchies within Ethiopian cities. Contrary to the image promoted by the state of harmony among residents of different ethnic backgrounds, our research revealed a great deal of tension, particularly concerning the distribution of benefits from state-led infrastructural development. The experiences of residents in rapidly changing neighbourhoods, demonstrate that the benefits of recent road construction are not necessarily distributed according to the policies of the current regime. Instead, historical inequalities interact with contemporary urban development in ways that may actually disrupt the state's vision of unity through diversity. Stratification is built into the city and attempts to reshape the city necessarily interact with recent and long-standing inequalities.

‘The time has come’, writes James S. Coleman, ‘to recognize the professional respectability as well as the practical essentiality of the ancient and honorable hybrid discipline of political economy.’1 Such an approach to the study of developing countries is as timely as it is prudent. This article attempts to apply the approach of political economy to the question of elite recruitment, the process by which individuals are selected and assigned to strategic, political, and administrative roles.2 It seeks to examine recruitment as a conflict of interests facing decision- makers in Kenya. Such a task seems most meaningfully handled by enlarging the boundaries under examination to include recruitment of the élite who are to manage Kenya's economy as well as its political structure. This method of analysis leads almost inevitably, under Kenyan circumstances, to a discussion of the crucial issue of resource allocation, for the priorities established in expenditure patterns are of direct relevance to the opportunity for members of various ethnic groups to compete in the market place for political and economic positions.

The need for regional economic integration in Africa was appreciated by most African leaders soon after their countries had become independent sovereign states early in the 1960s. Although they did not always make enough distinction between economic integration and political unity (indeed some, particularly the leaders of the so-called Casablanca group of countries, held the doctrinaire view that political unity and the formation of a United States of Africa must precede economic integration), and although very little has been achieved in either field, yet the past decade is likely to go down in African history as the decade of economic and political integration rather than the development decade.1 However, if positive results are to be achieved in the 1970s, the old doctrinaire attitude must give way to a more pragmatic approach, which neither demands political union as a precondition for economic integration nor takes an all-or-nothing attitude to the latter.

Since 1990, more than 30 sub-Saharan states have introduced multi-party electoral systems to choose their national governments. This development, normally understood as part of the post-cold war ‘wave of democratisation’, has led many to think that there is something intrinsically new about such a competitive process in Africa, which is not the case. This article looks at some elections that have been held in various states and studied, both before and after their independence.

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have a long history of promoting grass-roots membership organisations, but have made few attempts to document this experience in ways that are accessible to external audiences. Academic analysis has partially filled this gap by identifying the characteristics of strong organisations, but has had relatively little to say about how they develop, or the specific rôle which NGOs might play in helping them to emerge. This issue has recently assumed greater importance in the light both of donor wishes to strengthen civil society, and the more specific concerns of NGOs to scale-up their activities by helping the organisations with which they work to become more self-sufficient.

This article is drawn from a wider study which explores the strategies employed by NGOs in promoting membership organisations, and asks whether this can be done in ways which are both broadly equitable and reasonably cost-effective. It describes a programme mounted by the pan-African NGO consortium known as ACORD (Agency for Co-operation and Research in Development) to initiate a process of institutional development in the Nebbi District of Uganda. The case is of particular interest as an example of an attempt to introduce new institutions into a highly volatile environment, and provides a basis for arriving at a number of more general propositions about good practice.

The chain reaction set off in Paris by the Franco-Moroccan Declaration of 2 March 1956 still reverberates in the politics of north-west Africa. On that day, France ended 44 years of its protectorate over Morocco, restored to Mohamed V full sovereignty over 162, 120 square miles of land and some seven million people, and pledged ‘to respect, and see to it that others respect, the integrity of Moroccan territory, as guaranteed by international treaties’.1

This paper discusses the principal findings of a new integrated dataset of transnational armed conflict in Africa. Existing Africa conflict datasets have systematically under-represented the extent of cross-border state support to belligerent parties in internal armed conflicts as well as the number of incidents of covert cross-border armed intervention and incidents of using armed force to threaten a neighbouring state. Based on the method of ‘redescribing’ datapoints in existing datasets, notably the Uppsala Conflict Data Project, the Transnational Conflict in Africa (TCA) data include numerous missing incidents of transnational armed conflict and reclassify many more. The data indicate that (i) trans-nationality is a major feature of armed conflict in Africa, (ii) most so-called ‘civil wars’ are internationalised and (iii) the dominant definitions of ‘interstate conflict’ and ‘civil war’ are too narrow to capture the particularities of Africa's wars. While conventional interstate war remains rare, interstate rivalry using military means is common. The dataset opens up a research agenda for studying the drivers, patterns and instruments of African interstate rivalries. These findings have important implications for conflict prevention, management and resolution policies.

Samir Amin has recently argued that black African countries are all characterised by extreme forms of underdevelopment. In his view, this situation is produced by the dependency of African states on more developed countries that is a consequence of the continent's common historical experience of economic exploitation by European-organised mercantilism, the slave trade, imperialism, and colonialism. Moreover, via the mechanisms of western-based neo-colonialism, African under-development has been perpetuated, and perhaps even increased, during the achievement of political independence over the past 25 years.

By the early 1980s, it was becoming increasingly apparent to the Frelimo Government in Mozambique that its agricultural policies were not having the required effects. Production had not recovered to pre-independence levels as intended, agricultural exports remained generally low, and there was hunger in certain areas of the country. Queues and shortages were widespread in the cities, and rationing was introduced in the capital, Maputo. There were many exogenous factors accounting for these problems: alternating years of drought and floods, a constant state of war, first against the Smith régime in Rhodesia and then against South Africa and its client groups, and finally, of course, the world recession and worsening terms of trade.

Why does electoral clientelism persist when ballots are secret and elections are competitive? The provision of material rewards during campaigns is seen as the standard way politicians secure votes in ‘patronage democracies’. Yet monitoring clientelistic bargains is difficult when voting is secret, several competitors may provide material inducements simultaneously, voters view such inducements as gifts and not obligations, and candidates' records are more credible signals of future performance. I argue that where elections are competitive and voters expect gifts, candidates engage in a two-pronged strategy: affirm their own status through public displays of wealth, and undermine opponents' rewards by matching inducements or encouraging voters to break reciprocity norms. In result, neither side's gifts are sufficient for a win, and parties are forced to pursue different linkage mechanisms to voters. One such mechanism involves defining and targeting broader constituencies through policy proposals. Micro-level data from Ghana confirm these expectations. The theory is better suited to environments where candidates' past records are known to constituents than existing explanations, and accounts for the apparent contradiction between the ubiquity of campaign clientelism in Sub-Saharan Africa and recent empirical findings that performance evaluations and non-contingent incentives matter most to voters.

This article explores the role of perceptions in donor-African relations and the extent to which donor ‘images’ of African governments can be managed by these same governments to their advantage. The article focuses on donor views of ‘reliability’ in the Global War on Terror (GWOT) and compares differing international perceptions of Kenya and Uganda through this lens. Arguing that donors have an exaggerated sense of Ugandan ‘compliance’ or reliability and Kenyan unreliability in fighting terrorism, it explains this by examining the two governments’ international ‘image management’ strategies, or lack thereof. The analysis contends that Uganda's success at promoting itself as a major donor ally in the GWOT, compared with Kenya's general reluctance to do the same, has played a significant role in building and bolstering these differing donor perceptions. This, the article suggests, raises important questions about the nature of African agency in the international system.