This study explores the service-citizenship nexus in Nigeria, using the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) programme as an empirical backdrop. It attempts to understand the relationship between civic service and citizenship on the one hand, and it examines the question as to whether youth service promotes a sense of citizenship and patriotism on the other. In the relevant studies on service and sociology, the assumption that service is antecedent to, and impacts positively on citizenship, is taken for granted. However, conclusions from this study call for an urgent rethinking of this wisdom. Using data from open-ended interviews, questionnaires and focus group discussions, the study traces the ways in which political dynamics in Nigeria have affected the implementation of the NYSC programme. The study articulates allegiance to national ideals as an essential foundation for creating and nurturing citizenship. Although it upholds the potential of national service as a tool for national integration, this research cautions against unalloyed faith in its presumed agency, arguing that the limitations imposed by the prevailing socio-political ecology should not be ignored.

Written by over 200 leading experts from over seventy countries, this handbook provides a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of the latest theory and research on volunteering, civic participation and nonprofit membership associations. The first handbook on the subject to be truly multinational and interdisciplinary in its authorship, it represents a major milestone for the discipline. Each chapter follows a rigorous theoretical structure examining definitions, historical background, key analytical issues, usable knowledge, and future trends and required research. The nine parts of the handbook cover the historical and conceptual background of the discipline; special types of volunteering; the major activity areas of volunteering and associations; influences on volunteering and association participation; the internal structures of associations; the internal processes of associations; the external environments of associations; the scope and impacts of volunteering and associations; and conclusions and future prospects. This handbook provides an essential reference work for third-sector research and practice, including a valuable glossary of terms defining over eighty key concepts. Sponsored by the International Council of Voluntarism, Civil Society, and Social Economy Researcher Associations (ICSERA; www.icsera.org), it will appeal to scholars, policymakers and practitioners, and helps to define the emergent academic discipline of voluntaristics.

This comprehensive collection of the latest research and policy developments in civic service worldwide provides an informed assessment of what works and what doesn't work in the field. With contributions from some of the discipline's best-known global leaders, it presents a conceptualization and operational definition of civic service that allows for variations across nations and cultures. "Civic Service Worldwide" offers a perspective on the history and potential for civic service from its roots in military service. It summarizes the effects of national service in diverse countries, and identifies important developments in service, including service across the lifespan and transnational service. The editors and contributors also address key questions and promising theoretical and methodological approaches for advancing knowledge in the field.

This volume brings together the most up to date analyses of civil society in Africa from the best scholars and researchers working on the subject. Being the first of its kind, it casts a panoramic look at the African continent, drawing out persisting, if often under-communicated, variations in regional discourses. In a majority of notionally ‘global’ studies, Africa has received marginal attention, a marginality often highlighted by the usual token chapter. Filling a critical hiatus, theHandbook of Civil Society in Africa takes Africa, African developments, and African perspectives very seriously and worthy of academic interrogation in their own right. It offers a critical, clear-sighted perspective on civil society in Africa, and positions African discourses within the framework of important regional and global debates. It promises to be an invaluable reference work for researchers and practitioners working in the fields of civil society, nonprofit studies, development studies, volunteerism, civic service, and African studies. Endorsements: "This volume signposts a critical turning point in the renewed engagement with the theory and practice of civil society in Africa. Moving from traditional concerns with disquisitions on the appropriateness and possibility of the existence and vibrancy of the idea of civil society on the continent, the volume approaches the forms, contents, and features of the actually existing civil society in Africa from thematic, regional, and national angles. It demonstrates clearly the extent to which core intellectual work on civil society in Africa has largely moved from concerns with cultural reductionism to a nuanced examination of the complexities of (formal, non-formal, organizational, non-organizational, traditional, newer, usual, unusual) engagements, detailing the extent to which, over time, civil society as a concept has been indigenized, appropriated and adapted in the terrains of politics, society, economy, culture and new technologies on the continent. In all this, the book accomplishes the near-impossible. Without sacrificing the vigour, rigor and freshness of the often unpredictable fruits of up-to-date research into regional and national differences that crop up in the documentation of Africa's multiple realities and discourses, the volume weaves together a rich tapestry of the historical, theoretical and practical dimensions of an expanding civil society sector, and accompanying growth in popular discourse, advocacy, and academic literature, in such a diverse continent as Africa, into a meaningful whole of insightful themes. Written and edited by a very distinguished cross-continental and multi-disciplinary collection of researchers, research students, practitioners and activists, the volume provides cutting-edge evidence and makes a definitive case for a new lease of life for civil society research in Africa." -Adigun Agbaje, Professor of Political Science, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. "Throughout Africa, forms of civic engagement and political participation have seen dynamic change in recent decades, yet conceptions of civil society have rarely accounted for this evolution. This volume is an essential source of new thinking about political association and collective action in Africa. The authors offer a wealth of analysis on changing organizations and social movements, new forms of interaction and communication, emerging strategies and issues, diverse social foundations, and the theoretical implications of a shifting associational landscape. The contributors provide an invaluable addition to the comparative literature on political change, democratic development, and social movements in Africa." Peter Lewis, Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced international Studies

Examines the variety of mostly unorganized and informal ways in which Africans exercise agency and resist state power in the 21st century, through citizen action and popular culture, and how the relationship between ruler and ruled is being reframed.

Gives voice to the conscripts who are forced to serve indefinitely without remuneration under the ENS in a powerful critical survey of its effect from the Liberation Struggle to today. The Eritrean National Service (ENS) lies at the core of the post-independence state, not only supplying its military, but affecting every aspect of the country's economy, its social services, its public sector and its politics. Over half the workforce are forcibly enrolled into it by the government, driving the country's youth to escape national service by seeking employment and asylum elsewhere. Yet how did the ENS, which began during the 1961-91 liberation struggle as part of the idea of the "common good" - in which individual interests were sacrificed in pursuit of the grand scheme of independence and the country's development - degenerate into forced labour and a modern form ofslavery? And why, when Eritrea no longer faces existential threat, does the government continue to demand such service from its citizens? This book provides for the first time an in-depth and critical scrutiny of the ENS'sachievements and failures and its overarching impact on the social fabric of Eritrea. The author discusses the historical backdrop to the ENS and the rationales underlying it; its goals and objectives; its transformative effects, as well as its impact on the country's defence capability, national unity, national identity construction and nation-building. He also analyses the extent to which the national service functions as an effective mechanism of transmitting the core values of the liberation struggle to the conscripts and through them to the rest of country's population. Finally, the book assesses whether the core aims and objectives of the ENS proclaimed by various governmentshave been or are in the process of being accomplished and, drawing on the testimony of the hitherto voiceless conscripts themselves, its impact on their lives and livelihoods. GAIM KIBREAB is Professor of Research andDirector of Refugee Studies, School of Law and Social Science, London South Bank University. He is the author of Eritrea: A Dream Deferred (James Currey, 2009) and People on the Edge in the Horn (James Currey, 1996).

This book prescribes rapid revolution in principal sectors of this African economy through radical paradigm changes. And the resultant comprehensive transformation will guarantee significantly higher productivities and double digit annual economic growth. Included in this paradigm shift is the joint reindustrialization of the African economy and the US ailing industries via a new Strategic trans-Atlantic Alliance modeled on the balanced Euro-US cooperation after World War II. But it first takes readers through a thorough evaluation of the familiar subject - corruption - which haunts Nigeria, the principal economy in the continent. The fundamental difference with other texts on the subject is that this book identifies the most debilitating variant of that corruption. That variant causes massive capital flight from a post-colonial "soft economy" that is neither capitalist nor socialist. The Nigerian corruption thrives on the native Philosophy of Commission hardened by intractable "tribalism" that coagulated and ossified with the imports substitution pattern preferred by European firms since independence. The book then proceeds to earn its priced revolutionary credential by inventing very novel scientific methods that will skillfully turn this insidious source of structural rigidity and arrested development into a force for economic growth. A new apex political leadership culture is recommended and to be fortified with a unifying lingua franca. An inter-ethnic marriage melting-pot is advised for intensified nigerianization of Nigerian youths at birth. Spiritual diversity is envisaged to significantly diminish religious intolerance and sectarian violence. Modern bureaucracy and inward-looking tourism are reformulated to reduce effervescent insecurity and minimize capital flight. The resultant economic stability will enlarge domestic/foreign investment inflow; and will reverse the current dis-industrialization, and massive job loss, and the conditions of under-full employment. Technological Functionalism, Economic pan-Africanism, and the Alternative Policy of Inputs Substitution are among the several brand new blueprints that this book offers for the extensive transformation of Africa's economy into the robust emerging economy that will rival its counterparts in India and China in the immediate future.

This book critically examines the current social policy in post-apartheid South Africa and proposes an alternative social policy agenda to create a new development pathway for the country. Taking social policy as a vehicle that will facilitate the creation of a new society altogether, namely the "Good Society," the author argues for the adoption of policy that will socially re-engineer South Africa. The author shows how the policy tools and development interventions which were undertaken by the post-apartheid state in driving South Africa’s transformation agenda failed to emancipate many individuals, families, and communities from the cycle of intergenerational poverty and underdevelopment. He contends that social policy interventions that foster the social re-engineering of South African society must take place to untangle the inherited colonial-apartheid social order. This book includes comparative analyses on the Global South and Global North to present the ways in which countries such as post-Second World War Great Britain and Sweden, and post-independence Zambia of the 1960s and 1970s, were able to use social policy to create new societies altogether or places similar to the "Good Society." The conceptual and methodological issues that form the basis for this book reside in public policy-making and the public good and will be of interest to scholars of social policy, social development, and South African society.

Today we hear much talk of crisis and comparisons are often made with the Great Depression of the 1930s, but there is a crucial difference that sets our current malaise apart from the 1930s: today we no longer trust in the capacity of the state to resolve the crisis and to chart a new way forward. In our increasingly globalized world, states have been stripped of much of their power to shape the course of events. Many of our problems are globally produced but the volume of power at the disposal of individual nation-states is simply not sufficient to cope with the problems they face. This divorce between power and politics produces a new kind of paralysis. It undermines the political agency that is needed to tackle the crisis and it saps citizens’ belief that governments can deliver on their promises. The impotence of governments goes hand in hand with the growing cynicism and distrust of citizens. Hence the current crisis is at once a crisis of agency, a crisis of representative democracy and a crisis of the sovereignty of the state. In this book the world-renowned sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and fellow traveller Carlo Bordoni explore the social and political dimensions of the current crisis. While this crisis has been greatly exacerbated by the turmoil following the financial crisis of 2007-8, Bauman and Bordoni argue that the crisis facing Western societies is rooted in a much more profound series of transformations that stretch back further in time and are producing long-lasting effects. This highly original analysis of our current predicament by two of the world’s leading social thinkers will be of interest to a wide readership.

From the ivory tower to the barricades! Radical intellectuals explore the relationship between research and resistance.