This volume brings together a collection of papers which review the wide-ranging issues arising out of post-conflict economies in Africa. Case studies drawing on experiences from West, Central and Southern Africa, illuminate and complement the thematic overview. Extensive analysis illustrates the policies and strategies available for the reconstruction and rehabilitation of post-conflict African economies to establish sustainable political, social and financial institutions which promote stability, growth and equity and reduce the risks of conflict recurring.

In this timely book Milton J. Esman surveys a recurrent and seemingly intractable factor in the politics of nations: ethnicity. As the author notes, virtually no contemporary nation-state is ethnically homogeneous. Most address the political effects of domestic ethnic difference, and many fail in the attempt—with devastatingly violent results.Esman focuses on ethnic mobilization and the management of conflict, on the ways ethnic groups prepare for political combat, and on measures that can moderate or control ethnic disputes, whether peaceful or violent.Opening with a broad synopsis of current understandings of ethnicity and its varying political salience, he illustrates his theories by analyzing experiences in South Africa, Israel-Palestine, Canada-Quebec, and Malaysia. He also outlines the political issues and dilemmas, transnational as well as domestic, caused by the vast labor migrations of Mexicans to the United States, North Africans to France, Turks to Germany, and Koreans to Japan.Can economic growth and prosperity ease ethnic conflicts? Esman addresses this question and draws conclusions based on the empirical chapters. In his view, ethnic pluralism and ethnic politics are not collective psychoses or aberrations, to be deplored and exorcised, but rather pervasive realities that observers can confront and politicians can manage.

Picking up where Minorities at Risk left off, Peoples Versus States offers an expanded and updated perspective on ethnic and nationalist conflict throughout the world, as well as efforts to manage it. Ted Gurr surveys the behavior of 275 politically active ethnic groups during the 1990s and pinpoints the factors that encourage the assertion of ethnic identities. Whereas his highly acclaimed 1993 book presented a disturbing picture of spreading ethnic violence, this volume documents a pronounced decline since the early 1990s--a decline attributable, in part at least, to many states abandoning strategies of assimilation and control in favor of policies of pluralism and accommodation. Nonetheless, Gurr identifies some ninety groups as being at significant risk of conflict and repression in the early 21st century. And he cautions that the emerging global regime of principles and strategies governing relations between communal groups and states is far from perfect or universally effective.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

This is a complex volume that combines a good deal of survey data on Bakassi and its populations with more ethnographically based insights into the conditions of the Bakassi communities. The book is the outcome of research carried out by Fongot Kini between 2004 and 2009. The work is intended to serve as first hand exhaustive information on the live situation in the contested Bakassi Cameroon-Nigeria border region. The term Bakassi engenders multiple meanings loaded with many conflicting emotional, spiritual and material interests. Native inhabitants are systematically disinherited of their ancestral cultural heritage and socio-economic resources. They are bastardised, humiliated and scammed by unscrupulous opportunists who deliberately misidentify them with intentions of dispossessing them of their ancestral lands and natural resources. Overall the author is in sympathy with the Bakassi who he argues have been marginalised and neglected by the Cameroon state. In particular, the value of the indigenous communities in terms of local economies as well as securing this vital border area has not been recognised and various external groups have been either allowed or encouraged to settle there to both the detriment of local populations and to the security of the region.

Published in 1999, this text examines domestic wars, looking at inter-state relations only in as far as they are directly relevant to understand such wars. The book aims to indicate how intra-state war differs from the inter-state war, and focuses primarily on such domestic armed conflicts that at least have significant ethnonational components. The book assesses how heterogeneous a category "ethnic conflict" is in terms of causes and consequences, and gauges the complex interplay between class, regionalism and ethnicity. It is not limited to description and causal analysis, but also attempts to assess suggestions as to what types of actors may contribute in what ways to avoiding ethnonational mobilization/polarization, avoiding militarization of manifest conflicts, and de-escalating militarized conflicts by looking for tenable generalizations on what types of approaches are fruitful in bringing about de-escalation, ceasefires, political compromises, peaceful division or peaceful integration, reconciliation.

"Investigating the causes and consequences of ethnic conflict, the authors argue that the most effective responses are those that take into account factors at the local, state, regional and global level and that avoid seeking simplistic explanations and solutions to what is a truly complex phenomenon." "Ethnic conflicts are man-made, not natural disasters, and as such they can be understood, prevented and settled. However, it takes skilful, committed and principled leaders to achieve durable settlements that are supported by their followers, and it takes the long-term commitment of the international community to enable and sustain such settlements." --Book Jacket.

This collection of original essays breaks new ground by examining the dynamics of ethnic politics at the local level, rather than following in the footsteps of many previous studies which focus on the macropolitical level of states and nations. Governance in Ethnically Mixed Cities is based on extensive fieldwork and local observation, providing perspectives from a range of academic disciplines including Political Science, Geography, and Anthropology. It covers a variety of geographic areas from the Middle East (Kirkuk, Haifa, and Tel Aviv-Jaffa) to Europe (Mostar, Bolzano, Toulouse, and Florence), Central Asia (Osh in Kyrgyzstan) and the United States (Durham, North Carolina). In spite of the variety of disciplinary approaches and geographic diversity of the case studies, the contributing authors uncover a number of common elements of local ethnopolitical dynamics in mixed cities: the power of informal institutions, the effect of numerical balances between groups on local politics, and the significance of local competition for material and symbolic resources. Each of these areas provides a promising avenue for future research.

Ethnicity and Development explores the impact of ethnic fragmentation on the success or failure of nations and uses case studies of Bangladesh and Pakistan to illustrate this. It analyzes the role of institutions in engendering economic and social progress and challenges the New Institutional Economics (NIE) narrative. The book argues that the NIE narrative has some gaps, particularly that it is blind to ethnic fragmentation and therefore does not account for the construction of institutions that can build national cohesion in low- and low-middleincome countries (L/LMICs). It shows that L/LMICs have a different cultural context and that they need to first build national cohesion on a foundation of horizontal – across ethnic groups – and vertical – across classes – equity. The author’s analysis also examines other novel issues, such as the boost that is provided by nations acquiring the right of self-determination. Other novelties are the distinction between prime causes (triggers) for economic development and approaches for economic development. More important for this book is the distinction between natural and constructed nations and the conceptual framework presented to analyze their performance. Finally, the study examines the creation of national cohesion in ethnically diverse nations. Addressing a gap in the literature, this book will be of interest to researchers in development economics, political science and sociology and specialists in comparative politics/political theory with a focus on Area Studies.