Being a home to more than 80 ethnic groups, Ethiopia has to balance normative diversity with efforts to implement state law across its territory. This volume explores the co-existence of state, customary, and religious legal forums from the perspective of legal practitioners and local justice seekers. It shows how the various stakeholders' use of negotiation, and their strategic application of law can lead to unwanted confusion, but also to sustainable conflict resolution, innovative new procedures and hybrid norms. The book thus generates important knowledge on the conditions necessary for stimulating a cooperative co-existence of different legal systems.

Exiled populations, who increasingly refer to themselves as diaspora communities, hold a strong stake in the fate of their countries of origin. In a world becoming ever more interconnected, they engage in 'long-distance politics' towards, send financial remittances to and support social development in their homelands. Transnational diaspora networks have thus become global forces shaping the relationship between countries, regions and continents. This important intervention, written by scholars working at the cutting edge of diaspora and conflict, challenges the conventional wisdom that diaspora are all too often warmongers, their time abroad causing them to become more militant in their engagement with local affairs. Rather, they can and should be a force for good in bringing peace to their home countries. Featuring in-depth case studies from the Horn of Africa, including Somalia and Ethiopia, this volume presents an essential rethinking of a key issue in African politics and development.

With authoritarian states and global culture wars threatening human rights, this volume weighs hopes the for effective human rights advocacy.

This handbook investigates the current state and future possibilities of African Philosophy, as a discipline and as a practice, vis-à-vis the challenge of African development and Africa’s place in a globalized, neoliberal capitalist economy. The volume offers a comprehensive survey of the philosophical enterprise in Africa, especially with reference to current discourses, arguments and new issues—feminism and gender, terrorism and fundamentalism, sexuality, development, identity, pedagogy and multidisciplinarity, etc.—that are significant for understanding how Africa can resume its arrested march towards decolonization and liberation.

Through detailed analysis of local processes of interaction between Nuba and Arabic groups it gives new light to concepts such as Islamization and Arabization. The local processes affecting the economic and cultural survival of the Lafofa are presented in the context of the wider political history of the Nuba Mountains, and the position of the Nuba in the Sudanese society.

"Pastoralism is a culture, an ancient mode of livestock production and a way of life, which makes extensive use of grazing in the lowlands of eastern Africa and the Horn. However, this culture, form of production and way of life has reached a critical point. A process that began under colonialism - the dispossession of land and the promotion of agriculture - has been continued and accelerated by independent African states in the region. Pastoralism on the Margin shows that the material base of pastoralism has been all but eroded in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, and the situation has been exacerbated by climatic change, conflict, disease, drought and famine. The author, John Markakis, argues that the upsurge in development interest in pastoralism has done little to meet pastoralists needs, despite the huge amounts of money poured into the region. He discusses the many changes that have been visited on pastoralist men and women in the area and their way of life, and debates whether pastoralism can survive." -- BACK COVER.