Changes in the nature of federal financial relations were among the most striking features of the nearly 14 years of military rule in Nigeria. At the time of the January 1966 coup there was a great imbalance in the size of the four Regions, with a consequential built-in tendency for political instability. At the resumption of civilian rule in October there were 19 States of relatively balanced size, with an important rôle for the Federal Government as a mediator between them as well as an initiator of change.

The increase in crime and violence committed by young men known as lonetia in southern Karamoja, Uganda, has occurred in parallel to overall security improvements since the start of the 2006 disarmament campaign. This article examines the lonetia phenomenon from the perspective of the young men themselves. Panel data from four sets of interviews conducted in 2013 with approximately 400 young men provide details on the motivations of young men and the challenges they experience in the face of changing livelihood opportunities. We find that the lonetia category is highly fluid and that a set of behaviours and attributes correspond with the frequency of engagement in lonetia activity. Examination of seasonality highlights the contribution of hunger to lonetia frequency. We examine the perceptions of power and respect of young men in their communities as well as their propensity towards violence. The article concludes with thoughts on influencing lonetia involvement.

The term ‘New International Economic Order’ – often referred to as N.I.E.O. – suggests two immediate thoughts: the first is related to ‘New’ and the second emphasises ‘Order’.

The New Versus The Old International Economic Order

If there is to be a new order, then presumably it must be contrasted with an old order, an O.I.E.O., namely the Bretton Woods system which was established at the end of World War II as a result of Anglo-American negotiations, with an absorbing interplay between the intellect of Keynes, subtly representing British interests, coming up against the hard facts of U.S. power and economic supremacy.

This article is concerned with the rebellion in Darfur as a way to illustrate the politics of insurgency in the era of globalisation. We first show how the Darfur rebels have projected their struggle onto the world stage, before examining the effects that this has engendered. On the one hand, Darfur's global profile solidified the rebels' cause and co-opted international actors in support of it. This translated into real leverage for the rebels, and it constrained the Sudanese government by reducing its ability to use brute force. At the same time, internationalisation encouraged the Darfur rebels to make maximalist demands at the expense of articulating a broader political vision addressing the root causes of conflict. Moreover, the substitution of local legitimacy for international connections lowered the barriers of entry for new groups and thus promoted fragmentation. The combination of these effects makes for intractable conflict scenarios, the current situation in Darfur being a case in point.

In February 1974, Ethiopia entered a period of deep and occasionally violent political and social change, the result of the breakdown of a semi-feudal system under the impact of economic modernisation. Despite the fact that the army played, and is still playing, the central rôle, it would be wrong to regard the change simply as a coup d'état which replaced one authoritarian régime with another. The political movement that started then was the result of significant social and economic changes which took place during the last 15–20 years of the Emperor's reign.

In the middle 1970s, scholars and politicians agree, the Soviet Union began a major effort to penetrate Africa. After a decade of relative indifference to African developments, Soviet arms and advisers, in support of Cuban troops, poured into Angola and Ethiopia. Involvement in these two countries was supplemented by further transfers of arms to a number of other African régimes, and this seemed to signal a dramatically heightened interest in the continent.

There are fads in development economics,1 and the latest today, at least in the North, is what may be called laissez-faireism. This states the belief that a retreat from government activism in economic affairs is the major means of improving the quality of a country's performance. It is seen as ‘central to the solution of a lot of the problems we see around the world’.2

Such a strategy stresses the benefits of reliance on markets, on profit incentives, and on the growth of private sectors. Free-market pricing is crucial not only for products (in Africa, particularly agricultural products), but also in factor markets and in international transactions. Wages should be allowed to find their own level, as determined by supply and demand. Exchange rates should also be permitted to approach their natyral levels, for artificially over-valued exchange rates are especially damaging. Tariffs and other forms of protection should be cut back. Countries should turn away from inward-looking import-substitution towards outward-looking export-orientation. 3

There has been a high level of debate over critical features of politics in Ghana during the Nkrumah period, for example, on the role of ethnicity, the mass party, authoritarian rule, and strategies of economic development. This review of studies of Ghanaian politics focuses on the treatment devoted to only a few areas of political inquiry: (1) the nature of the socio-economic, political, and territorial framework within which political action occurred; (2) the kinds of political structures which developed in Ghana, with primary attention to parties and the party—state relationship but also to certain state structures—for example, the civil service and national assembly; and (3) the types of political demands which were made upon the system, how they entered the system, the capability of the system in terms of these demands, and the degrees of legitimacy and institutionalisation of political roles, structures, or processes involved.

African attitudes to income inequality have hardly been studied. As a result, we may have been missing a crucial part of the answer to the question why Africa is so unequal. This paper presents evidence that, across all self-identified class categories, African respondents in 16 African states, representative of all the regions of the continent, are on average considerably more tolerant of inequality than respondents from 43 comparable developing and transition countries. The aim of the paper is to try and explain these differences. It concludes that (a) a modified version of Albert Hirschman's notion of the ‘tunnel effect’ and (b) religious devotedness in the African context provide explanations for the observed variation between African respondents and their counterparts elsewhere. Experienced inequality, in contrast to overall income distribution, influences the tunnel effect more widely than economic growth. Religious belief shapes inequality tolerance in Africa more than the observance of religious practices.

The colonial system is a system of social relations based on the political and economic domination of backward peoples by imperialist powers, in a world divided territorially and economically. The colonial régime is a monopoly exercised by the bourgeoisie of an imperialist country, based on economic and extra-economic pressure in a dependent country. This imperialist monopoly has two basic functions: on the one hand, it exploits the colonies; on the other hand, it maintains and develops the political enslavement necessary for its own existence.

Green-grabbing has recently been suggested as a label for describing processes of dispossessions undertaken in the name of conservation in sub-Saharan Africa. For the case examined here, the Dukuduku forest and the Mfolozi flats in northern KwaZulu-Natal, we will argue that the label obscures more than it helps illuminate the complex processes leading up to the present-day struggle over land rights. The land in question has been subjected to a number of different land uses in the past: hunting, conservation, commercial agriculture and small-scale agriculture. We show how contestation over desirable future land use options lies at the heart of the problems raised by an ongoing land claim to the forest.

On 24 February 1966, Apolo Milton Obote, the Prime Minister of Uganda, marched into a meeting of his Cabinet with an armed escort, arrested five of his Ministers, and suspended the 1962 independence constitution he had solemnly sworn to protect. Since that fateful day Uganda has known no peace. Indeed, factional divisions and the ambitions of politicians, followed by the military dictatorship of Idi Amin after his coup d'état in 1971, soon reduced the country to howling anarchy.

It has been argued recently that implementing a laissez-faire approach to economic development faces serious difficulties in Africa.1 This article provides some empirical evidence on the question by comparing the recent efforts of two countries to move towards less interventionist policies. Both Zambia and Ghana attempted to reverse their deteriorating economic performance by introducing major reform measures during the mid-1980s. Their different experiences illustrate both the positive effects that laissez-faire policies can have when resource allocation has been constrained by extensive controls, and the difficulties of sustaining and financing a reform programme.

White Africans are particularly associated with the troubles South Africa and Zimbabwe have faced throughout their histories. The story of the Franco-Mauritians, the white elite of Mauritius, and how they have fared during more than forty years since the Indian Ocean island gained independence, is much less known. However, their case is relevant as a distinctive example when attempting to understand white Africans in postcolonial settings. Unlike whites elsewhere on the continent, Franco-Mauritians did not apply brute force in order to defend their position in the face of independence. Yet the society that emerged from the struggle over independence is one shaped by dominant beliefs about ethnicity. As this article shows, despite a number of inverse effects Franco-Mauritians have benefited from this unexpected twist, and part of the explanation for their ability to maintain their elite position lies therefore in the complex reality of ethnic diversity in postcolonial Mauritius.

This paper provides a detailed analysis of the cotton sector reform process in Mali from 2000 to 2011, explaining reform delays and ambiguities in terms of the wider political and socio-economic context and aid relationships. Contrary to arguments pointing to lack of state commitment and ownership, domestic stakeholders increasingly worked towards finding an acceptable and consensual reform package. The process encountered quite serious obstacles, however, due to divergent actors' incentives, and the existence of opposing philosophies about what a restructured cotton sector should look like. As a consequence of donors' misjudgement of the political and social realities underlying the Malian cotton sector, dialogue among stakeholders was difficult and polarised, forcing the government to spend considerable time and resources to find a suitable compromise. This paper contributes to a better understanding of the merits and limits of pursuing consensual policy processes against the constraints posed by divergent donors' policy paradigms.

Policy research involves two acts of translation: translation of the problem from the world of reality and policy into the world of scientific method, and then a translation of the research results back into the world of reality and policy.1

Since the political scientist, David Easton, commented critically in 1959 on the state of the study of politics by anthropologists,2 many interesting changes have taken place in the analyses of African politics – in fact, of politics of non-western societies in general.

A Large volume of transactions between states goes through bilateral channels associated with traditional diplomacy. Accordingly, each independent African state has established its network of formal contacts with those members of the international community it considers friendly, and who similarly reciprocate this gesture of good will. Indeed, a noticeable world-wide trend in the last decade has been to diversify and intensify such diplomatic contacts because of the increasing complexity and interdependence of the contemporary international system. But bilateral relations between states, pervasive as they are, by no means constitute the totality of channels of international transactions.

Ever since the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910, Jan Smuts, one of its principal architects, had visions of transforming it into a ‘Greater South Africa’,. The South Africa Act of 1909 which established the Union provided for the eventual incorporation of other African Territories. It madespecific reference to Southern Rhodesia and the neighbouring British dependencies of Basutoland, the Bechuanaland Protectorate, and Swaziland, Known collectively as a High Commission Terretories because, pending transfer to the Union, they were admitted by the British High Commissioner to South Africa.

The distribution of personal incomes in contemporary African societies is powerfully influenced by public-sector salary and wage structures. Even where capitalist and hence pro private-enterprise development strategies have been openly pursued, as in Kenya, the public service accounts for over 40 per cent of total employment in the modern sector. Where more statist, quasi-socialist strategies have been abopted, as in Ghana and Tanzania, this percentage rises to over 70. Clearly, then, any discussion of income distribution and the potential rôle of incomes policy hinges on an adequate understanding of the processes that determine remuneration in the public sector. And this in turn requires a comprehensive historical analysis of the political economy of each society – in particular, the process of class formation and the rôle of the state.

IT is widely acknowledged that the origins of Africa's hunger crisis lie only partly in weather patterns. A growing number of studies have emphasised the rôle which the state plays in creating a policy environment which either undermines or promotes commercial agriculture.1 Much of the fault for the latter's poor performance in many areas of the continent is assigned to short-sighted government policies of excessive intervention in agricultural markets. The cardinal sins are considered to be price controls, food subsidies, and state-run marketing boards. As the external debt of African states grows, foreign lenders and aid donors impose economic reforms deemed necessary to address the long-run structural problems. The austerity packages of the International Monetary Fund, for example, aim to reduce demand in the borrowing country by cutting government spending on subsidies, while the World Bank focuses on stimulating agricultural production through a mixture of targeted investments and advice on how to change the pricing and tax structure so as to improve incentives for farmers.2