The first edition of this incisive text on the problems of drought and famine facing Africa won worldwide critical acclaim. Revised with a new introduction, Lloyd Timberlake's bestselling study is invaluable reading for anyone interested in Africa.

The contributors not only study state breakdown but compare the consequences of post-communism with those of post-colonialism.

Civil wars, corporate exploitation, AIDS, and Ebola—but also democracy, burgeoning cities, and unprecedented communication and mobility: the future of Africa has never been more uncertain. Indeed, that future is one of the most complex issues in contemporary anthropology, as evidenced by the incredible wealth of ideas offered in this landmark volume. A consortium comprised of some of the most important scholars of Africa today, this book surveys an intellectual landscape of opposed perspectives in order to think within the contradictions that characterize this central question: Where is Africa headed? The experts in this book address Africa’s future as it is embedded within various social and cultural forms emerging on the continent today: the reconfiguration of the urban, the efflorescence of signs and wonders and gospels of prosperity, the assorted techniques of legality and illegality, lotteries and Ponzi schemes, apocalyptic visions, a yearning for exile, and many other phenomena. Bringing together social, political, religious, and economic viewpoints, the book reveals not one but multiple prospects for the future of Africa. In doing so, it offers a pathbreaking model of pluralistic and open-ended thinking and a powerful tool for addressing the vexing uncertainties that underlie so many futures around the world.

Based on fieldwork in four African countries, this study reveals how African businesses can be key responders to wider social and political crises.

In this book, Jeremiah I. Dibua challenges prevailing notions of Africa's development crisis by drawing attention to the role of modernization as a way of understanding the nature and dynamics of the crisis, and how to overcome the problem of underdevelopment.

3. Investing in people.

This book analyses regional interventions in African conflict spaces by engaging with political discourse theory. Interventions are a performance of agency, but what happens if interventions are performed by forces that scholars have hardly ever considered as relevant agents in this regard? Based on a study of regional politics towards the crises in Burundi and Zimbabwe, the book analyses how these interventions shaped and changed the emerging regional interveners. The book engages political discourse theory, proposing an understanding of intervention as a field, in which multiple and heterogeneous interpretations of the violence, the crisis, and the future post-conflict order ‘meet'. It is not hard to imagine that this encounter is not harmonious per se but full of frictions. By making use of political discourse theory as a grammar for studying the complexity of an intervention, the focus is directed to the emerging subjectivities of regional interveners. This enables a view of regional interventions that neither reduces their subjectivity to universalist categories associated with 'liberal peace' nor overenthusiastically embraces them as the solution to all problems. This book will be of interest to students of international intervention, discourse theory, African politics, war and conflict studies, security studies and IR.

This book chronicles foreign political and military interventions in Africa from 1956 to 2010, helping readers understand the historical roots of Africa's problems.

"This book is about the games that Great Powers play. Nearly half of all UN peacekeeping missions in the post-Cold War era have been in Africa, and the continent currently hosts the greatest number (and also the largest) of such missions in the world. Uniquely assessing five decades of UN peacekeeping in Africa, Adekeye Adebajo focuses on a series of questions: What accounts for the resurgence of UN peacekeeping efforts in Africa after the Cold War? What are the factors that have determined the success, or contributed to the failure, of the missions? Does the mandating of so many peacekeeping missions signify the failure of Africa's regional security organizations? And, crucially, how can a new division of labour be established between the UN and Africa's security organisations to more effectively manage conflicts on the continent? Adebajo's historically informed approach provides an in-depth analysis of the key domestic, regional, and external factors that shaped the outcomes of fifteen UN missions, offering critical lessons for future peacekeeping efforts in Africa and beyond." --

The Responsive University puts forward the proposition that the societal legitimacy of universities depends on whether and how they respond to societal challenges. This issue is exemplified in South Africa, one of the most unequal countries in the world.