Tag Archives: Aid and Development

African Peacebuilding Network Research Grants

The African Peacebuilding Network (APN) of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) invites research grant applications from African researchers, policy analysts, and practitioners working on conflict and peacebuilding at universities and research institutions or regional governmental and non-governmental organizations in Africa. About the African Peacebuilding Network The APN promotes independent African research and analysis on… Read More »

CFP: Special Issue of African Identities on Contemporary Youth Cultures in Africa

Call for papers for a special issue of African Identities to be published in the summer of 2012 (African Identities: Journal of Economics, Culture and Society) More than a decade and half ago, Donal Cruise-O’Brien (1996) had declared that the African youth were ‘a lost generation.’ This fatalistic summation of the fate of the African… Read More »

Europe and America’s ‘master narratives’ of Africa

G. Pascal Zachary in Fanzine: The master narratives about Africa are inevitably political; art about Africa and Africans, especially art created by non-Africans, inevitably becomes intertwined with the historical use and abuse of the African imaginary. The political entanglements of literary artists engaged with African affairs are complicated by the emergence of a new humanitarianism,… Read More »

A Bleg: Where are the psychologists doing research in Africa?

Sometime last week I attended a podium discussion at the Berlin Humboldt University. The topic was Africa as the laboratory of globalisation. The idea was to discuss different ways in which Africa serves as a laboratory for ideas that then travel to other parts of the world. Some of those on the podium are STS… Read More »

Kofi Annan on the threat to Africa’s fledgling democracy

The piece is mostly about Côte d’Ivoire, as one would expect, but he ends it with this: National leaders must learn that to provide democratic legitimacy, elections must be free and fair. The international community must understand that every time it turns a blind eye to electoral abuse, it becomes complicit in degrading democracy’s potential.… Read More »

Identity Economics: Social Networks and the Informal Economy in Nigeria

… is the title of a recently published book by Kate Meagher of LSE’s Department of International Development, my friend and fellow student of African trade networks and informal economy. Nicolas van de Walle writes in Foreign Policy about the book: Within development circles, conventional wisdom has it that successful manufacturing sectors often develop in low-income… Read More »

France and Francophone Africa

Stephen Smith writes in the BBC Focus on Africa Magazine about the relationship between France and its former colonies in Africa. One of the things he looks at is what has changed after the fall of the Berlin Wall and what has not. There is a little about the economic relations, but I miss a… Read More »