Post-World War II French colonial reforms, most notably those of the 1956 loi-cadre, began the process of decentralising political authority to the territorial components of the Fédération d'Afrique occidentale française (A.O.F.),1 and the Fédération d'Afrique equatoriale française (A.E.F.).2 By 1958 most of these French colonies had become autonomous Republics within the Communauté franco-africaine. Although only Guinea had opted for complete political independence in the Gaullist referendum held that year, pressures were clearly mounting in that direction for other members of the now defunct Federations.

Private sector development (PSD) has emerged as a core component of donor strategies aimed at making free markets work for ‘the poor’ through assistance to business sector capacity in low-income states. PSD initiatives cannot be understood, however, as technical exercises aimed solely at promoting development through business competitiveness. Instead they serve as normative concessions through which developmentally questionable market-opening has been rationalised by donors in pursuit of lucrative commercial opportunities in emerging economies. Examining the European Union's (EU) PSD framework in bilateral relations with the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) states, the article examines the utilisation of PSD discourse in the ‘development branding’ of Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs). PSD discourse is seen to facilitate a ‘double-veiling’ of asymmetric ACP–EU trade ties via legitimising images of equitable market-opening and the trickle-down of business wealth to ‘the poor’. Nevertheless, the reality of reciprocal trade structures combined with Europe's anaemic PSD resources bears little resemblance to the strategic illusions of PSD. In particular, the interventions of Europe's Centre for the Development of Enterprise (CDE) in cotton and textiles sectors in East Africa are seen to have dubious outcomes for ‘development’ in ACP former colonies.

Despite stipulations in the Sudan's 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that all ‘other armed groups’ be demobilised by January 2006, the South Sudan Defence Force (SSDF) continued to maintain a significant armed presence in South Sudan. This paper analyses the dynamics of the organisation, the impact of its ongoing presence on the security situation and reconstruction efforts, and attempts by the government of South Sudan to counteract the SSDF from January to August 2006. It argues that the strategies implemented by the government to counter the SSDF were fairly successful in that there was no major return to conflict. However, it concludes that the SSDF's continued presence, while hindered, has the potential to spark a return to civil war.

While Africa was in the throes of the decolonisation process, many of its leaders considered classical federalism an effective way of reconciling unity and diversity.1 Along with their counterparts in Europe, they reasoned that federalism would compensate for the nation-state's inability to meet modern political, economic, and strategic demands without at the same time threatening the special interests of the constituent parts. Federalism would avoid the extreme of overcentralisation seemingly implicit in unitary government as well as the risks of disintegration which continually threaten multilateral economic and military communities. Such a system had worked for political craftsmen in earlier times; now it was to be extended to the needs of Africa.

Many social scientists have examined the intricacies of modernisation, political modernisation, and political development, but they have not clearly distinguished between these concepts. Their research emphasis has been on the instruments of change, such as political parties, ideologies, and charismatic leaders, and they have insufficiently delved into the issue of what actually changes during the processes of modernisation and political development. In addition, a number of analyses are unintentionally culturally biased as many western values are viewed as ‘positive’, and the ultimate ends of historical evolution which are presented seemingly suffer from ethnocentric wish-fulfilment.

As evidence of the failure of policy-based aid mounted in the early 1990s, a ‘new aid agenda’ developed. The agenda emphasised among other things, the importance of dialogue and partnership in order to help build ownership of more complex second-generation reforms. The Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) has developed as the key instrument for implementing this partnership in much of sub-Saharan Africa. However, this is not the only objective of the PRSP. Tanzania, at the forefront of attempts to restructure government–donor relations and one of the first countries to prepare a PRSP, illustrates the tensions created by the PRSP's complex genealogy and how these are being worked out in practice.

Since Malawi became independent on 6 July 1964 diplomatic relations with her eastern neighbour, Tanzania, have been almost permanently strained. Differences between the two states have focused on three sets of issues: contrasting attitudes and policies towards the white minority régimes to the South, President Banda's suspicion that Tanzania was aiding and abetting the attempts by certain prominent Malawi exiles to subvert his régime,1 and a dispute over the de-limitation of the boundary between the two states along Lake Malawi (Nyasa).

These issues are not easily separable: for if it had not been for Banda's outspoken policy towards the white South (which led him alone amongst African statesmen to establish diplomatic relations with South Africa), there would have been no compelling grounds for Tanzania, which opposed this policy, to offer asylum and support to his political opponents; and if it had not been for Tanzania's confrontation, not only with South Africa but also with the Portuguese authorities in Mozambique (with whom Malawi also maintained close relations), it is doubtful whether President Nyerere would have been provoked during May 1967 into bringing the Lake dispute into the open. There is no doubt also that Malawi exiles in Dar es Salaam were actively campaigning against Banda's régime, at this time, over the whole range of his policies, including the question of the Lake.

China has become a significant contributor to closing Africa's infrastructural gap, but Chinese companies are repeatedly criticised for not involving local businesses in their operations, and for isolating themselves from the socio-economic environment. Can this be attributed to ‘typical Chinese business practice’? This article employs linkage theory to examine the weak domestic backward linkages in Chinese-led construction projects in Mozambique. The analysis shows that while Chinese companies do not involve Mozambican businesses in their activities to any extent, this cannot be attributed solely to any ‘Chinese business model’. It is a consequence of weak local industrial capabilities, fragile social infrastructure and a liberal policy environment not conducive to the creation of domestic backward linkages in Chinese-led construction projects.

This article examines the institutional politics of law enforcement in Nigeria by focusing on illegal drug control since the mid 1980s. It assesses the available academic research on law enforcement governance, and contrasts it with an in-depth case study of drug law enforcement. The case study confirms views of the politicised nature of law enforcement. However, it goes beyond the patron–client centred approach to politics prevalent in the literature on African policing. The article adds an institutional dimension to the study of law enforcement governance, highlighting processes of centralisation, exclusion and shifting bureaucratic interests that have been central to the development of Nigerian drug law enforcement. It is based on previously inaccessible data from inside Nigerian drug law enforcement.

At midnight on the evening of 3 October 1966, the former British Protectorate of Basutoland attained its political independence and assumed the new title of Lesotho. From that time, after a period of nearly 100 years of colonial administration, the British Government officially relinquished all its formal, direct, legal and financial control of the country. Although this has not meant, as some have suggested, the complete rejection by Britain of any financial assistance and responsibility to its former dependency, it has nevertheless forced Lesotho to become to an even greater extent than ever before the economic hostage of South Africa. In the context of the present good relations between South Africa and Lesotho, the term ‘hostage’ is perhaps the wrong one to use, conveying as it does fairly strong emotional overtones. But it is clear from even the most cursory examination of the economic situation that Lesotho will become more and more economically dependent upon South Africa—irrespective of the political party in power. As an enclave of South Africa, Lesotho has always been closely integrated economically with the Republic by virtue of its peculiar geographical position.1 This, together with the country's extreme climate and inhospitable terrain, enforces an external dependence which makes nonsense of political desires for complete self-sufficiency.

AFRICA South of the Sahara became so marginalised during the 1980s that its share of world trade fell from 3·8 per cent in 1960 to 1·05 per cent in 1989. And it has attracted relatively little foreign investment, with the exception of a few exporters of petroleum: only 2,000 million US dollars in 1995 corresponding to 2 per cent of the total for developing countries. Indeed, the continent's share (including North Africa) declined from 11 per cent in 1986–90 to 4 per cent in 1994.

There has been an armed struggle for independence in Eritrea since the dismantling of its ‘federation’ with Ethiopia in 1962. Particularly since the fall of the imperial régime in 1974, the war has claimed many lives, and continues to cause economic and social dislocation in the region. Despite what has happened during the past three decades, however, the so-called ‘Eritrean question’ remains a widely misunderstood phenomenon, not least because there is no authoritative and scholarly modern political history of this part of Africa.

Land law reform through registration and titling is often viewed as a technocratic, good-governance step toward building market economies and depoliticising land transactions. In actual practice, however, land registration and titling programmes can be highly partisan, bitterly contentious, and carried forward by political logics that diverge strongly from the market-enhancing vision. This paper uses evidence from Côte d'Ivoire to support and develop this claim. In Côte d'Ivoire after 1990, multiple, opposing political logics drove land law reform as it was pursued by successive governments representing rival coalitions of the national electorate. Between the mid-1990s and 2016, different logics – alternatively privileging user rights, the ethnic land rights of autochthones, and finally a state-building logic – prevailed in succession as national government crafted and then sought to implement the new 1998 land law. The case underscores the extent to which deeply political questions are implicated in land registration and titling policies.

ON 16 August 1983, towns throughout Nigeria's Ondo State erupted into violence. The ostensible cause was popular reaction against rigged gubernational elections which favoured a National Party of Nigeria (N.P.N.) candidate in an overwhelmingly Unity Party of Nigeria (U.P.N.) State. It is easy to dismiss the violence in Undo (and in Oyo State too) as the protest of a frustrated plebiscite – as indeed it was. But western accounts of ‘the breakdown of democracy’ in Africa, so often associated with primordialism, tribalism, and class conflict in plural societies, seldom grasp experiences of the breakdown itself.1 From the external perspectives of national integration and voting behaviour, popular violence involving mobs and crowds is characterised as affective, ‘irrational’ action, in contrast to the ‘rational’ norms of institutionalised democracy.2

Before the late 1960s, historians generally agreed that World War II had increased mass support for African nationalism. Initially, they claimed that soldiers returned home politicised by war-time experiences and looking for opportunities to spread new ideas acquired through contacts with Asian nationalists. Subsequent scholars gradually chipped away at these assumptions, some completely discarding them as ‘myths’. Current opinion suggests that the way African soldiers reacted to the war depended on their ethnicity, class origins, education levels, and military occupations, and that their role in independence politics depended on local conditions.

Across African democracies, maintaining popular trust in electoral management bodies (EMBs) is vital to enhancing election integrity and, ultimately, regime legitimacy. However, scholars have largely sidestepped any systematic analysis of how citizens formulate their attitudes towards EMBs and how these attitudes vary over time. To address these gaps in the literature, we focus on Kenyan EMBs, which have experienced fluctuating popular support since the ruinous 2007 elections and subsequent institutional reforms. Using primary election reports and original survey and focus group data, we analyse the sources of Kenyans' trust in EMBs from 1992 onward and probe the 2013 election period deeply. Across time, we find that confidence in EMBs usually collapses after polarised elections, due to perceived problems with the EMB's autonomy and capacity. Following the 2013 elections, Kenyans were also more likely to lose confidence in the EMB if they were affiliated with losing presidential candidates or if they were critical of EMB performance.

Population politics in Tanzania reflect multiple understandings of the ‘problem’ of population. While Tanzania has a long history of family planning service provision through its childspacing programmes, a national population policy was not adopted until 1992. This work explores the ambiguity and ambivalence reflected in the discourse surrounding the Tanzanian National Population Policy. Although an international consensus on questions of population and family planning may have been reached at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, when we look at actual cases of policy formulation and implementation, the discourse reflects ambiguity and conflict rather than consensus. The Tanzanian case suggests that this ambiguity may be strategic. Competing ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ approaches have been articulated from the level of national policy negotiations to that of local implementation. This enables the Tanzanian government, promoting a ‘positive’ view of population, to ally itself with proponents of an expanded reproductive health agenda without alienating the elements of the population establishment that pushed for a population policy and fund its implementation.

Home historically to a politically engaged youth sector, Nigeria has, over the past two decades, witnessed a growing incidence of religious extremism involving educated youth, especially within university campuses. For all its important ramifications, and despite the continued infusion of social and political activity in the country by religious impulse, this phenomenon has yet to receive a systematic or coherent treatment in the relevant literature. This paper aims to locate youthful angst displayed by Nigerian university students within the context of postcolonial anomie and the attendant immiseration of civil society. Youth religious extremism on Nigerian campuses reflects both young people's frustration with national processes, and their perceived alienation from modernity's ‘cosmopolitan conversation’.

This article traces the rise and decline of a grassroots community organisation in rural Senegal. It has three aims. First, it problematises the sometimes idealistic nature of the rhetoric and literature on community-based development. Second, it suggests three factors that contribute to the effectiveness of rural self-help organisations: educated and technocratically skilled leadership, unintentionally benevolent state neglect, and a willingness to syncretically recycle elements of ‘traditional' social order and culture in the service of contemporary development tasks. Finally, the demise of the community-based organisation examined here suggests a need to shift focus away from the institutionalisation of community-based or civil society organisations per se, and to consider instead the routinisation of the participatory, empowering, and deliberative socio-political conditions that make possible the regular emergence of new grassroots organisations across time within a given community. Recent events (since 2005) in the village in question support this shift, as a new generation of community leaders has begun to craft a new community organisation, explicitly built from the detritus of the older organisation described in this article.