With the prevailing violent conflict situation of our world, perpetuated sometimes even in the name of religion, humanity today faces extinction. To reverse this ugly trend, humanity has no choice than to build a society where every tribe and tongue can coexist in peace. This work analyzed the violent conflicts from anthropological, behavioral, politico-philosophical, and theological perspectives, and makes a demand on humanity to save herself through proper education and dialogue with all men and religions.

This dynamic international collection provides a comprehensive overview of twin cities on administrative and international borders across the world. Drawing on contemporary and historical examples, it documents constant and changing features of twinned communities over time. The chapters explore a variety of urban formations including independent cities located side-by-side; cities that have merged over decades or even centuries and those projected to merge; cities partitioned by treaties and cities duplicated in pursuit of better security, intensified trade or both between neighbouring countries. From Europe to Africa, North America to the Middle East, South America to Asia, this book focuses on relationships between cities, citizens and municipal/international borders. A cartographical contents and editorial commentary guide readers through diverse contributions. The authors ask how far cities are changing or remaining constant in the context of conurbanisation, Europeanisation and globalization. The book provides a glimpse into the variety of roles twin cities can play globally: from laboratories of integration and para-diplomatic actors to economic and cultural brokers. This is a valuable, engaging resource for researchers in the fields of geography, urban studies, border studies, international relations and global development. It will be of great use to individuals involved in twin-city initiatives and general readers.

Decolonizing Colonial Development Models in Africa: A New Postcolonial Critique confronts colonial development models to decolonize methodologies, epistemologies, and the history and practice of development in postcolonial African societies and advocates for Afrocentric alternatives. By taking a critical approach and drawing on postcolonial, postmodern, post-developmental, and post-structural theories, the contributors identify and analyze the effects of global inequality, racism, white supremacy, crisis, climate change, increasing environmental insecurity, underdevelopment, chronic diseases, and the vulnerability of the postcolonial societies of the global South. Together, the collection calls for and theorizes a new direction of development that incorporates indigenous-Afrocentric alternatives.

This paper generally lends support to the arguments advanced by Awonusi (1989, 1990, 2004) and others in favour of an endornormative as opposed to an exonormative standard for English pronunciation in Nigeria. They include the fact that the existing, exonormative standard, British Received Pronunciation (RP), has undergone and is still undergoing changes in its homeland, and is not homogeneous. The heightened social mobility of today’s world perhaps works against the demarcation and homogenization of language varieties, and this is all the more true of the varieties or lects that have been proposed for Nigerian English when these are related, more or less explicitly, to educational attainment. Major attention is given in the paper to a schema of basilect, mesolect, and acrolect presented by Ugorji (2010), with a focus on his account of vowels and his presentation of a mechanism derived from optimality theory for evaluating vowels in contention. The basilect and the mesolect are found to be so close to each other that they might be combined. There would then be just two varieties. In contrast, the acrolect is close to British RP, albeit with many variants due to the conflict of two standardising forces, i.e. British RP and the basilect-mesolect. The vowel system of an officially adopted endonormative standard – ‘Nigerian RP’ – would mainly be the same as that of British RP, but the optimality mechanism could be employed to give preference to some of the Nigerian variants for inclusion in it.

The chapters in this volume foreground the ambivalent role of religion and culture when it comes to African women’s health and well-being. Reflecting on the three major religions in Africa, i.e. African Indigenous Religions, Christianity, and Islam, the authors illustrate how religious beliefs and practices can either enhance or hinder women’s holistic progress and development. With a specific focus on Zimbabwean women’s experiences of religion and culture, the volume discusses how African Indigenous Religions, Christianity, and Islam tend to privilege men and understate the value of women in Africa. Adopting diverse theological, ideological, and political positions, contributors to this volume restate the fact that the key teachings of different religions, often suppressed due to patriarchal influences, are a potent resource in the quest for gender justice. In sync with the goals for gender justice and women empowerment envisioned in the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 and Africa Agenda 2063, the contributors advocate for gender-inclusive and life-enhancing interpretations of religious and cultural traditions in Africa.