This article traces the evolution of the Nigérien–Nigerian boundary over the past 20 years. It focuses in particular on a single border crossing that separates two neighbouring Hausa villages of equivalent demographic size, administrative status, and economic importance. During the past two decades, border control, monitoring and surveillance have gradually intensified, resulting in the establishment of immigration and customs offices on the Nigerian side of the boundary and a douane (customs) post on the Nigérien side. However, local inhabitants do not view these changes in terms of ethnic partition or division. Rather, they see border control infrastructure positively, in terms both of development and national identity. For the border line Hausa, identity is not zero-sum: feeling more and more Nigérien/Nigerian does not result in diminution of their ‘Hausa-ness’. Post-9/11 international pressures to intensify border controls and monitoring in regions where Muslim extremists are thought to shelter highlight contradictions between indigenous and international conceptions of the African frontier.

Research carried out in two densely populated wards of Kampala in 2012 shows that food-insecure households dropped, or significantly decreased, their consumption of matoke, the plantain staple, soon after its availability declined and the market price rose. They shifted to a diet for which the base was a stiff maize porridge (posho), eating just one meal a day. Many such households were headed by grandparents, single grandmothers especially. For the full set of household heads interviewed (118), access to rural family land (kibanja) stood out as critical for achieving year-round urban food security. With few exceptions, households that farmed ‘at home’ – about half the sample – saw themselves as food secure. Access negotiations, however, could be difficult, especially for women. The growing number of grandparents responsible for raising grandchildren and nieces/nephews, many of whom were orphaned, has given rise to a new discourse whereby care is increasingly given to maternal grandchildren.

Zaïre, by the early 1990s, by some accounts had all but vanished. One senior American diplomat described it as nothing more than the presidential vessel ‘Kamanyola’ anchored safely offshore in the Zaïre River, an élite praetorian guard compensated in hard currency, the remote marble city of Gbadolite, a shrivelled state superstructure nourished by diamond smuggling. Its perennial President, Mobutu Sese Seko, was characterised contemptuously by a French official as ‘a walking bank account in a leopard-skin cap’. More than a decade ago, a former publicist for the central régime had relegated the once-powerful state to a zone of non-existence: ‘The state does not exist or no longer exists in Za’. The 1992 National Conference resolved to expunge Zaire from history by restoring its earlier colonial and post-colonial nomenclature of ‘Congo’.

Governance reform practice has mostly focused on building up and transforming central state institutions. Furthermore, the politics of aid has often constructed a very ‘introverted’ politics based in large cities. This article explores the means through which governance ideas are implemented outside this ‘governance realm’, by looking at the ways in which the Lushoto District government in Tanzania has mediated a range of policy changes that have emanated from the state/donor centre. Identifying three distinct but inter-related repertoires of political practice, it argues that governance at the local level has been largely about financial management, and that this aspect of reform is in tension with local developmentalism and is more starkly opposed to local veranda politics.

Why did the Ghanaian state go to such extraordinary lengths to facilitate the reliable broadcast of the World Cup in 2014? During a period of frequent power outages, Ghana swapped power with regional neighbours and directed major domestic industries to reduce production in order to allow Ghanaians to watch their national soccer team compete in the World Cup. This paper investigates the politics of the public service provision of electricity in Ghana. We focus on the short-term crisis during the 2014 World Cup to reveal the citizens' and politicians' expectations about electricity as a public good. Drawing on an analysis of archival documents, Ghanaian newspapers, and interviews with government, business, and NGO officials in the energy sector, we argue that the Ghanaian state historically has created the expectation of electricity as a right of national citizenship and explore how this intersects with competitive party politics today.

During the era of President Abdoulaye Wade, a household waste crisis periodically held the streets of Dakar in its noxious grip. This paper analyses the crisis in light of waste management's role as a fundamental urban public service, key employment sector, and visceral symbol of the city's management. It examines how the institutional landscape of waste management took centre stage in a power struggle within the state that centred on reconfiguring the labour of ordering the city. At the same time, it reveals how the waste-workers' union emerged as one of the most visible and savvy labour movements in contemporary Senegal. Through the creative disorder unleashed by intentional acts of dirtying, workers and residents alike forged new claims to the city. Conclusions are drawn for the wider implications of the disorderly city for the urban question in Dakar and the landscape of citizenship in Senegal's contemporary period.

Why do non-state armed groups forcibly recruit civilians? To address this question I develop a conceptual framework distinguishing voluntary, coerced and forced recruitment. I then compare the recruitment tactics employed by ‘Mai-Mai’ militias and the RCD-Goma rebel group in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in order to inductively develop a theory explaining why groups with different initial economic and social endowments resort to force. This comparison draws on interviews with 41 former militia members and 11 former members of RCD-Goma. The theory suggests that forced recruitment is most likely to occur when non-state armed groups experience manpower deficits and when accountability (to local communities, government sponsors and/or the international community) is low. High levels of popular support will not necessarily prevent recourse to force under these conditions, but may mean that force is less necessary because voluntary and coerced recruits come forward to fill manpower gaps.

It is known that the forms of physical education practised among ancient Greek communities reflected the differential importance attached to military and artistic activities.1 Similarly, today, variations in the relative pre-eminence of collective over individual sports are likely to reflect contrasts in the socio-economic and cultural profiles of contemporary societies.2 Moreover, modes of social participation in a particular game should be affected by the patterns of interaction prevailing in the society at large.

This article examines the trajectory of the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo), currently the ruling party in Mozambique, focusing on the complex interplay between various factors which contributed to the metamorphoses it has undergone since its founding in 1962. Recent work in the field of international relations and historical sociology has thrown light on the rôle of the state as an administrative-coercive entity constantly cross-pressured by domestic and foreign forces, and acting simultaneously on both fronts in pursuit of advantage. While this scholarship has not focused on ruling parties per se, it is arguable that the standard government versus state dichotomy is of limited analytical value in cases such as Mozambique, where the distinction between party and state remained in practice, until recently, a constitutional nicety. When the ruling party has been institutionalised to the extent of Frelimo, and where the state has become almost an extension of the party, it is the latter that is the key variable in any explanation of political and economic change within society.

On 4 February 1976 the Federal Military Government of Nigeria promulgated Decree No. 6, initiating the removal of the national capital from Lagos to Abuja. Thus Nigeria followed Brazil, Botswana, Malawi, Pakistan, and Tanzania to become the most recent developing country to arrange for a transfer of its centre of government. The proliferation of new capitals constructed in the twentieth century has captured the world-wide attention of geographers, architects, planners, and demographers, but the literature on the subject examines these projects almost exclusively with a focus on planning for national development. This viewpoint too often neglects politics as the paramount force in the relocation of a nation's capital city.

In a recent article, Heribert Adam argued that the ‘prevalent view of South Africa combines conceptual errors with false methodological emphasis and, often, wishful thinking’, and that the ‘popular perspective represents a gross over-simplification of a far more complex situation.’1 The analysis to which he was objecting views South Africa as an outdated colonial society, in which white settlers enforce a racially defined domination upon an exploited mass of the black population, which is reduced to serving primarily as a source of cheap labour for white capital by an immense battery of totalitarian controls. Linked to this view - and now fuelled by the widespread riots during mid-1976 throughout African urban areas - is the assumption that substantive political change will necessarily come about by violent revolution, motivated by the growing determination of a burgeoning black population to force a redistribution of power and wealth. However, as Adam further pointed out, analysis of South Africa purely in terms of racial conflict leaves important questions unanswered, for there is need to explore how the differential distribution of wealth and resources - political and economic - originated, and how they are maintained.

In recent years, there has been growing interest among lower-middle income countries (LMICs) to reduce their dependence on donor resources, framed normatively as ‘beyond aid’. Yet, public perceptions about beyond aid narratives remain under-studied. This article explores current public perceptions in Ghana about the ‘Ghana Beyond Aid’ (GhBA) vision aimed at promoting structural economic transformation through the use of national resources while reducing dependence on donor aid. Drawing on 67 semi-structured interviews with government officials, civil society organisations (CSOs), donor representatives, academics, ‘ordinary citizens’ and media reviews, this article examines public understanding, rationale and perceived barriers to the implementation of the GhBA vision. I show that while GhBA is a welcome development for promoting structural economic transformation and ownership over national development priorities, mechanisms for propelling the GhBA are largely absent. Achieving GhBA will require a conscious effort by government and stakeholders to move beyond political rhetoric and partisan politics to setting out clear policy direction in addition to building a national consensus in promoting the vision. Implications of the research findings are discussed.

In 1954 several hundred Hai//om San were evicted from their homes in Etosha National Park in the former South West Africa. As a result they joined the legions of landless generational farm-labourers who sustained an uneconomic and heavily subsidised white-owned commercial agricultural sector. This paper explores the predicament of this community vis-à-vis land rights in post-apartheid Namibia. It draws on recent historical research to contextualise Hai//om demands for land, and discusses the emergence of history as a dominant paradigm for the articulation of contemporary Hai//om identity. Likewise it explores the Hai//om's invocation of history to justify their demands for greater parity in land access. In doing so, it queries the usefulness of invoking an indigenous rights model as a justification for Hai//om land claims.

How do government policies and practices affect struggles over collective identity and struggles over land? Examining the interconnections among collective identity struggles, land struggles and state policies and practices in post-apartheid South Africa, this paper argues that the government's contradictory policies and ambivalent practices have aggravated collective struggles over the boundaries of belonging. Specifically, the differing definitions of community set forth in traditional leadership, land tenure and land restitution policies exacerbate existing divisions among ‘communities’ concurrently subject to these policies and create practical policy dilemmas for decision-makers. This paper illustrates the interplay between public policies and collective identity struggles through close examination of struggles among the Barokologadi ba ga Maotwe, a so-called traditional community. The Barokologadi case underscores the necessity of attending to these interactions.

Associations have been labelled the main ‘building blocks’ for creating social capital. It has been argued that community associations need to transform ‘bonding’ into ‘bridging’ ties to ‘reach out’ while also creating ‘linking’ ties to ‘scale up’. External development actions follow a reverse logic in promoting these associations: they assume that linking ties with the external intervener will reinforce prior social capital endowments. This article highlights the inherent difficulties of such a ‘social engineering’ approach in the context of post-conflict reconstruction, describing three development interventions in the north of Burundi. It defines the process of ‘institutional syncretism’ – merging local with global institutional settings – as a key element to social capital building. The findings illustrate how the three interventions failed to reach this objective, and question ‘bridging’ associations as ‘universal blueprints’ for restoring social cohesion within the liberal peace model for post-conflict reconstruction.

Political, social, and economic development take place in space as well as time, but all too often they are written about and studied as though they existed at a point, which, it will be recalled, has position and no magnitude. In a sense, all social scientists are historians, and use the temporal dimension as a framework within which to examine the political, social, and economic behaviour of men. But few feel comfortable trying on the geographer's spatial shoes, and, beyond an occasional location map, hesitate to examine the developments in the dimension that is his particular concern. Part of the trouble, of course, is that the map imposes a stricter discipline upon us than we care to admit: to map anything beyond the merely trivial we have to measure it, while fuzzy but intuitively valid ideas such as economic development, political power, and social integration make us coy, or evoke surprisingly emotional responses that such things are incapable of being measured in any meaningful fashion. But, whether we like it or not, developments of all kinds do take place in space; what, then, can the geographer, with his spatial perspective, contribute to our knowledge of these things?

National governments, politicians, policy-makers, and planners have become increasingly concerned with the manner in which human populations have been distributed among the component parts of many nations in the Third World, and especially with the three key processes of mobility, fertility, and mortality. As alterations in birth and death rates tend to have far stronger national than regional components, and as such changes can only affect relative population distribution over a very long period of time – in the absence of catastrophic wars and famines – the regulation or influencing of migration is the most effective way of changing the distribution of people between regions or between rural and urban sectors. Such alterations may be seen as desirable for a variety of reasons, including the need to overcome present (or future) imbalances between the distribution of population and resources, and to assist in the implementation of certain national socio-economic goals.1

Chinese involvement in Africa may be conveniently dated from the Bandung conference of April 1955, which marked the initiation of a policy of Chinese Communist co-operation with the states of Afro-Asia. Inasmuch as the movement in Africa which resulted in the independence of many states in the next decade had hardly begun at that time, the most significant African contact made by China at Bandung was with President Nasser. The development of contacts between the two states led Egypt in May 1956 to become the first African country to give its official recognition to the Chinese People's Republic (C.P.R.). Thereafter the Suez crisis served to bring the two countries still closer together.

The devaluation of the Communauté financière africaine (CFA) franc occurred on 12 January 1994. Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Central African Republic, Comoros, Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Senegal were immediately affected as the value of their currency decreased by 50 per cent. One French franc now became worth 100 instead of 50 CFA – in reality a 100 per cent increase in the cost of goods purchased on the international market with the CFA franc.

Of the dozens of conflicts in the Third World which have occurred in the post-war era, few have been of greater duration and bloodshed or have attracted the attention of as many outside actors, including the superpowers, as Angola. It has only been since the mid-1980s that the conflict began moving towards eventual settlement, with the prospects for peace often seeming to depend largely on the attitudes of Cuba, South Africa, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Further affecting the overall environment was the state of East–West relations, the internal situation in Angola, and South Africa's occupation of Namibia. A short historical background will serve as prelude to an extensive examination of the dynamics which fuelled the war in Angola for such a long period of time.