South Africa's growing economic presence across the African continent has sparked a debate in public and scholarly circles as to its intentions. While some have been quick to see South African business and parastatals as part of a larger hegemonic project pursued by Pretoria, the authors’ more structured analysis of economic ties with Africa reveals a more complex picture. Institutionalised forms of regional cooperation, such as SACU and SADC, must be contrasted with the activities of South African multinationals and parastatals on the wider African stage to understand the possibilities and limitations of hegemonic practice open to South Africa. Beyond its own region, a key determinant will be its relations with the other leading African power, Nigeria, as well as its ability to compete with other external actors. Finally, the role of ideology is a crucial measure of South African hegemony, and while certainly its ‘soft power’ is evident at the societal level, some African elites actively resist the pull of South Africa-based ideas.

Religious modes of thinking about the world are widespread in Africa, and have a pervasive influence on politics in the broadest sense. We have published elsewhere a theoretical model as to how the relationship between politics and religion may be understood, with potential benefits for observers not just of Africa, but also of other parts of the world where new combinations of religion and politics are emerging. Application of this theoretical model requires researchers to rethink some familiar categories of social science.

Due to its four decades of high long-term economic growth and democratic system, Botswana has been depicted as an exceptional success story in a region full of economic and political failures. In this article, a structural analysis is applied, and it is argued that Botswana's success should be understood as one of pre-modern growth without development. It is claimed that although the country may be a growth miracle, it has not yet experienced ‘modern economic growth’, characterised by structural change in patterns of production as well as in social and political institutions. Such analysis also offers an explanation for the duality of Botswana's economy and society, since pre-modern growth, as opposed to development, allows for significant poverty rates and extremely unequal resource and income distribution to prevail in the midst of plenty.

This article critically reflects on what impact a supported and formalized artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) sector could have in Northern Ghana, where poverty is deeply rooted, the outcome of decades of government neglect. Since independence in 1957, numerous attempts have been made to improve the living standards of the populations in the country's North but deteriorated human resource bases and shortages of infrastructure have limited their effectiveness. A recent upsurge in ASM activity, however, has catapulted the region on to another – previously unimaginable – growth trajectory entirely. As findings from research carried out in the township of Kui in Bole District of the country's Northern Region illustrate, ASM has injected considerable wealth into many of Ghana's Northern localities, in the process helping to stabilise their economies and alleviate the hardships of tens of thousands of farm-dependent families. The intensification of support to, and the formalisation of, ASM, could prove to be an important step toward eradicating a poverty problem that has plagued this region of sub-Saharan Africa for more than a century.

Quota policies securing the presence of marginalised groups in decision-making bodies have been adopted across sub-Saharan Africa. These policies are frequently understood through the lens of a pluralist perspective. This stance is not appropriate in African regimes characterised by executive dominance. Through a qualitative study of official documents, newspaper articles and interviews conducted during two field studies in Uganda in 2005 and 2010, this article shows how the understanding of quota policies in Africa may gain from the corporatist debate on interest representation. The analysis reveals that the incumbent National Resistance Movement has employed the reserved seat policy strategically to maintain its dominant position, and that strategies for using the quota system have evolved gradually over time in response to key political events, and the interests of group activists at the local and national levels with vested interests in its survival.

Drought and famine have become so inextricably linked in both popular and academic analyses of Africa's food problems in the 1970s that the relationship between the two is now taken almost axiomatically as cause and effect. The logic is simple and persuasive. Drought produces crop failure and crop failure, just as inevitably, leads to human starvation. This reasoning and the colour photography of starving children in the world press have proved so irresistible that social scientists have had surprisingly little rôle in scholarly discussions of the causes of the recent African famine. The subject has been left almost entirely to climatologists, physical geographers, water experts, and agronomists. Social scientists have so taken it for granted that the causes of African famine are natural and climatic that most of their literature on the subject falls into the genre of‘impact’ studies which omit the issue of causality and deal almost entirely with the social and political after effects.

Why are ‘growth coalitions’ involving business interest groups and governments so rare in Africa? How has democratisation affected the possibilities for growth coalitions? In three cases with varying degrees of democracy – Mauritius, Zambia, and Zimbabwe – we find that hypotheses about growth coalitions that place importance on the organisation of the business sector are generally borne out. Yet even when the business community is organised in an ‘ideal’ manner, growth coalitions still depend on factors within the state: leadership, ideas, and capacity. Democratisation has a mixed effect. We find that in the case of Zambia, business–state relations did not improve despite a pro-democracy stance by business and the pro-business agenda of the democratic government coming to power in 1991. In Zimbabwe, the erosion of democracy reduced business access to state elites, breaking up a growth coalition that initially showed considerable promise. In Mauritius, the strengthening of democracy has paralleled the deepening of the growth coalition, and both have been reinforced by a strong economy. Our study shows that growth coalitions are possible in Africa; the key lies in determining the conditions under which such coalitions can be sustained in Africa's fragile polities.

Liberian ex-combatants are generally seen as uprooted urban youths with a history of unemployment, underemployment and idleness. The data that form the basis of this article suggest another picture. What caused the Liberian youth to fight were mainly security concerns, suggesting that the effects of ‘idleness’ and ‘unemployment’ are overstated with regards to people joining armed groups. They went to school, worked and lived with parents or close relatives prior to the war. They are not Mkandawire's (2002) uprooted urban youths or Abdullah's (1998) ‘lumpens’. They lived quite ordinary Liberian lives, and based their decision on whether to join an armed group on the security predicament that they believed that they and their families were facing. This suggest that disarmament, demobilisation, reintegration and rehabilitation approaches are in need of re-thinking that links them more directly to social cohesion and societal security.

This article proposes an alternative interpretation of political disorder in Ethiopia's Somali Regional State since the rise to power of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) in 1991. Some observers have perceived contemporary politics in the former Ogaden as an example of ‘internal colonisation’ by highland Ethiopians. Others attribute political instability to the ‘nomadic culture’ inherent in the Somali clan structure and the ineptness of its political leaders. This study argues that neither of these two politicised narratives grasps the contradictory interactions between the federal Ethiopian government and its Somali periphery, nor the recursive relations between state and society. With reference to the literature on neo-patrimonialism, I elucidate political disorder in the Somali Region by empirically describing hybrid political domination, institutional instability, and patronage relations, showing how neo-patrimonial rule translates into contested statehood in the region and political devices ranging from military coercion to subtle co-optation. Rather than unilateral domination, a complex web of power and manipulation between parts of the federal and regional authorities animates political disorder in Ethiopia's Somali Region.

During the last decade, the flow of oil revenue into Nigeria has expanded spectacularly, dwarfing other sectors of the economy. Its implications for development, for the growth of a commercial capitalism, and for the corresponding emergence of a more defined class structure are crucial issues about which much has been written. What we have heard less about, however, is how the ordinary people of Nigeria react to the floods of petro-naira which they themselves cannot reach. Fortunes are being made out of oil, but the living conditions of the rural and urban masses deteriorate as agriculture declines and the urban centres become overcrowded with the jobless and the impoverished. What are the attitudes of these people to the petro-naira? The answer to this question is no less important than an analysis of the hard economic data for our understanding of what is actually going on in Nigeria today.

Since the restoration of traditional leaders in Uganda in 1993, the Kingdom of Buganda has developed unusually effective institutions, financing mechanisms and policy tools, re-building itself as a quasi-state. The reinforcement of Buganda's empirical statehood provides one of the farthest-reaching examples of the current trend of traditional resurgence in African politics and to some extent supports claims for the participation of traditional structures in contemporary political systems. Yet, the Buganda experiment also highlights the limits of traditional resurgence as a mode of reconfiguration of politics in Africa. First, it is unclear how the kingdom can maintain the momentum of its revival and the allegiance of its subjects in view of its fiscal pressure on the latter and the limited material benefits it provides to them. Already the monarchists are finding it difficult to translate the king's symbolic appeal into actual mobilisation for development, shedding doubts on one of the main justifications for the kingdom's rebirth. Second, Buganda's claims to political participation clash with the competing notion of sovereignty of the post-colonial state. These limits are likely to confront other similar experiments across the continent.

Botswana ranks very high in sub-Saharan Africa in income per capita, and in such indicators of human development as public expenditure on health and education. Nevertheless, inequalities of wealth and income are particularly severe, in both international and domestic comparisons. Although wealth and poverty are mediated and expressed in complex ways, the disparities between the very rich and the very poor are established, structured, and growing.

THE Portuguese were the first Europeans to come across the island of Mauritius. It was found by the Dutch in 1598, and the Dutch East India Company settlement created in 1638 introduced both sugar cane and slavery. The French arrived in 1721, using slaves to clear large holdings which eventually became sugar cane plantations. Over time there emerged a colonial society of extreme inequality, where power and privilege belonged to estate planters from France while hard labour and deprivation became the lot of slaves imported from Africa. The British established political control of Mauritius in 1814 and preserved the structure of the island's economy and society with one exception: slavery was abolished in 1835 with generous compensation to slave owners. The colonial state helped to organise the importation of indentured workers from India, and by the 1860s the island had become the leading cane producer in the British Empire.

Our aim in this article is to contribute to understanding the effects of firearms on the relationship between the state and pastoral communities in contemporary northeast Uganda. The Karamoja region has from early colonial times been a peripheral zone. Although successive post-colonial regimes have made episodic efforts to incorporate this zone more fully into Ugandan national space, relations between Karamoja and the centre remain distant and distrustful. The transformation of local modes of conflict by large-scale infusion of the AK-47 has had far-reaching effects both on relationships with the Ugandan state and its local representatives, and within Karamoja societies. The younger men who possess these weapons elude the authority of the elders, and entertain ambiguous relations with the state authorities, whom they may serve as auxiliaries or resist.

This article analyses the ways in which socio-political opposition is expressed by looking into the morally loaded discourse of political legitimacy in Burkina Faso that emerged after the assassination of the journalist Norbert Zongo in December 1998. Through the analysis of different political statements, newspapers and various comments from the ‘street’, it locates the struggle against impunity in a social and political undercurrent in Burkinabe society. In this context, notions of the public space are central, because the public space defines both the boundaries of public debate and the behaviour of key political actors. Two recurrent themes in Burkinabe political discourse, namely ideas of truth and courage, and the legitimacy of White people, illustrate the various ways in which socio-political opposition seeks to define the public space within which politics is to be practised and the behaviour to be observed by those acting there. But the struggle against impunity also takes place on a symbolic level at which key symbols are appropriated, interpreted and incorporated into political discourse.

The debate over peace in Sudan has centred on the ongoing talks in Naivasha, Kenya. This paper argues, however, that sustainable peace is not simply a function of the implementation of an agreement between the SPLA and Khartoum, but that other fracture lines will run through post-conflict Sudan. Here we draw attention to the rupture between the Dinka, dominant within the SPLA, and the Equatorian peoples of the far south, hundreds of thousands of whom were driven from their homes or faced with economic and political oppression under SPLA occupation. As these refugees return, it will be through local government structures that Equatorians will or will not be integrated into the SPLA political project for Southern Sudan. Thus, local government figures prominently in the possibility for sustainable peace. We describe the origins and structure of local government in Southern Sudan, situating it in the history of political tension between Dinka and Equatorians. We then describe the challenge of equitably distributing land and foreign aid to returnees in the context of ethnic politics and a massive NGO presence.

A noted economist (Perroux) has defined socialism as ‘le développement de tout l'homme et de tous les hommes’. Providing the motor for a drive towards socialism there is generally to be found a conviction that man's creative potential can only be fully realised in a society which transcends the cultural centrality of “possessive individualism’ and in which a signal measure of economic and social equality, the preconditions for genuine political democracy, are guaranteed. In the best of socialist intellectual work, however, socialists have been equally interested in economic development and in the full release of the potential for growth of the productive forces in a society. Within this tradition it was perhaps Marx who most dramatically fused the concern for economic development and the concern for the elimination of class inequalities in his presentation of the socialist case. He argued that the inequalities of the bourgeois society of his day increasingly meant that the potential of the available industrial machine would not be realised: inequality and muffled productive forces thus went hand in hand’.1

South African women's success in moving from active participation in the liberation struggle to active participation in government has been exceptional on a world scale. Their achievement is based in the long history of women's struggles against apartheid and for gender equality in the African National Congress. The result has been a political representation that is grounded in the experience of a united women's movement in the transition to majority rule and a firm policy consensus towards gender equality within the ANC. This has enabled women politicians to entrench gender equality goals within government discourse. Yet, the success has come with the price of a women's movement that has lost its strong leaders to government, and women politicians who lack the support of a strong women's movement. Thus, in the moment of greatest victory South African women lack the mass movement that propelled them to success, suggesting that the struggle is not done with yet.

Poor farmers often lack credit to purchase agricultural inputs, and rely on their buyers to provide it. This paper considers the effects of mobile phones on traders of perishable foodstuffs operating between Tanzania's Southern Highlands and Dar es Salaam's wholesale market, with a particular focus on the importance of credit in the relationship between potato and tomato farmers and their wholesale buyers. It argues that the ability to communicate using these new information and communication technologies (ICTs) does not significantly alter the trust relationship between the two groups. It also suggests that farmers, in effect, often have to accept the price they are told their crops are sold for – irrespective of the method of communication used to convey this message – because their buyers are also their creditors. In this situation, many farmers are unable to exploit new mobile phone-based services to seek information on market prices, and potential buyers in other markets. Doing so runs the risk of breaking a long-term relationship with a buyer who is willing to supply credit because of their established business interaction. It is suggested that, under a more open system than currently exists in Tanzania, mobile-payment (‘m-payment’) applications should target these creditor-buyers as key agents in connecting farmers to the credit they so often require.

Political life in Africa was described 25 years ago as ‘an almost institutionless arena with conflict and disorder as its most prominent features’. However, the wave of national conferences in Africa in the current decade would have been inconceivable without the various institutions and beliefs that have persisted despite the prevalence of dictatorship. These ‘fragments of democracy’ have been manifest in trade union movements, voluntary associations, and the nascent political parties that have organised popular protests against authoritarian régimes during the past few years.