University cultures in the Global North generate powerful definitions of what constitutes “knowledge” and “good research.” When we ask who gets to represent the “African perspective,” we find it is decreasingly an African. This article argues that resource inequalities alone cannot explain this exclusion of African scholarship. Hegemonic academic standards undervalue the more positivist research orientation found in southern African universities. The struggle is not over the validity of that orientation, but over who has the power to validate it. This analysis is based upon interviews with senior university research managers in Zimbabwe and on a public roundtable on Structural Inequalities in Global Academic Publishing.

Although the sixtieth anniversary of the ASA’s founding offers an occasion to celebrate the association’s accomplishments, it also coincides with a historical moment of resurgent authoritarianism, growing intolerance, and renascent nativism. Democratic institutions in the United States and abroad are under attack; bigotry, injustice, and incivility have become re-energized. This article reflects on the discourses, spaces, and technologies employed by Africans to contest the multiple expressions of political exclusion on the continent over the last sixty years. It finds inspiration and lessons that might guide us as we develop our own forms of political advocacy in this illiberal age.

So-called canned hunts take place within fenced private game ranches and typically target animals bred in captivity solely for that purpose. Thousands of semidomesticated lions form the focal point of South Africa’s canned-hunting industry. Notions of animal welfare, “fair chase,” and conservation have been deployed to varying degrees to sway public opinion surrounding canned hunts in South Africa and abroad. While state regulatory efforts have largely failed to date, the Campaign Against Canned Hunting (CACH) has successfully promoted stricter controls on the importation of lion trophies in Australia, Europe, and the United States, in part by highlighting the recent death of Cecil, a charismatic lion shot by an American bowhunter in Zimbabwe.

It is generally recognized that rural constituents are critical for winning elections. Development economists also recognize the importance of pro-agricultural policies to economic growth. Yet, little attention has been paid to the effect of rural politics on regime stability. Against conventional wisdom, this article argues that leaders who support rural areas and suppress urban demands are better able to stabilize the state and avoid coups. Because Ghana was able to politically stabilize after a period of state decay and five coups, the article presents an in-depth analysis of the tactical decisions made by the Ghanaian head of state who presided over these changes, John Jerry Rawlings. Using process-tracing, the study illustrates the importance of rural coalitions to stability and regime success.

This study clarifies the meaning of clientelism and documents its extent in sub-Saharan Africa—a region that political scientists and policy makers often view as especially clientelistic. It proposes an understanding of clientelism as personal contact between citizens and politicians in which citizens request selective rather than public goods in exchange for political loyalty. It then suggests that assessments of clientelism in Africa are sensitive to the amount of information about personal contact that surveys provide. Closed-ended Afrobarometer surveys suggest that personal contact is mostly clientelistic, whereas the original open-ended questionnaires employed in an original survey from Niger suggest that the bulk of citizen requests are programmatic. Leveraging detail in Nigeriens’ qualitative accounts of visiting and calling politicians, the highly personalized contact of Nigeriens can be understood as an adaptation to limits on impersonal contact, not a sign that politicians are circumventing formal channels of communication in order to distribute patronage under the table.

Human–wildlife conflict (HWC) is often considered in terms of how the impact on humans can be mitigated, but in the context of the larger goal of meeting conservation goals. This article explores the hidden costs of HWC on human well-being in northern Kenya through a qualitative case study of Laikipia County. Drawing on narratives of wildlife as destructive, wildlife as inherently more important or valuable than humans, and wildlife preservation as a pathway for capturing resources, it explores the impacts of HWC on human well-being, situating the study within the HWC, political ecology, and human security literature.

This article utilizes a newly available dataset on the geographical distribution of development projects in Zambia to test whether electoral incentives shape aid allocation at the subnational level. Based on this dataset, it argues that when political elites have limited information to target distributive goods specifically to swing voters, they allocate more donor projects to districts where opposition to the incumbent is strong, as opposed to districts where the incumbent enjoys greater popularity.

This article is driven by an empirical paradox over where Somalia came from (pre-colonial clan-states) and where it ended up (return to pre-colonial clano-territorial conflicts). Existing academic studies on contemporary Somalia, which were supposed to provide critical analysis, continue to applaud the creation of clan-states within the failed state of Somalia. Based on a variety of unique primary sources, this article offers a new perspective on the current state formation processes occurring in the purview of the Somali State. Somali clans are determined to come to terms with the state collapse by averting the return to political power of the detested military regime, which was led by one clan-based leadership that tended to terrorize other rival clans and denied any equal power- and resource-sharing framework. Conceptualizing the contemporary Somali state as similar to pre-colonial clan-sultanates, this article argues that contemporary Somalis are reverting to a pre-colonial realm where each clan had its clan sultan seeking for a clan-state of its own right. Where else do clan-states compete against each other in entering into “treaties” with external entities intent on exploiting war-torn Somalia as tabula rasa? It is towards the objective of answering this question and of providing a better understanding of the Somali conflict that this article is offered to add a comparative empirical understanding of the different trajectories of state formations in Somalia.

Despite periodic violent conflict between farmers and Fulani herders in many parts of Ghana, cooperative relations between them remain strong. They are “cultural neighbors” who cooperate both in times of violent conflict and during periods of no conflict. Cooperation between them is expressed through everyday interactions, cattle entrustment, resource sharing, trade, friendship, intermarriages, visitations, exchanges, communal labor, and social solidarity. Borrowing from theorizations of cultural neighborhood and everyday peace, this paper uses specific case studies from Northern and Southern Ghana to illustrate the enactment of cooperation between herders and farmers in areas of violent farmer-herder conflict.

In 1913, a Special Commission Court in Sierra Leone saw a series of trials concerning members of the Human Leopard Society, and conflated this society with the regional Poro Society. This article examines one of those trials and unearths motivations for murder and questions of bias. With the reinvention of identity in the shadow of slavery, a nuanced and complicated picture emerges of the situation. Though more questions than answers are offered by the details of the case, this article problematizes Sierra Leone under British authority, and shows a nuanced snapshot of power struggles playing out in a murder trial.

This article aims to analyze the emergence of the migration-development nexus after decolonization in Francophone sub-Saharan Africa. The first section explores the way in which French governmental bodies and NGOs started to frame public policies linking migration and development in the 1960s and 1970s. The second section highlights how developmentalist ideology was mobilized in the 1980s in order to set up return policies in partnership with African governments who were increasingly inclined to control migrants’ monetary remittances. The last section emphasizes how the migration-development nexus was orchestrated to control migratory flows from the late 1980s onwards.

This article investigates food security and well-being in the context of “development-forced displacement” in Ethiopia. In the lower Omo, a large hydroelectric dam and plantation schemes have forced people to cede communal lands to the state and business speculators, and indigenous communities have been targeted for resettlement in new consolidated villages. The authors carried out a food access survey in new villages and in communities not yet subjected to villagization and complemented this with ethnographic research carried out over a period of four years. The results of the two methodological approaches were inconsistent. The survey data suggest that household food access was poor in both places but better in villagization sites than in the other communities. The ethnographic research, however, suggests that village settlers were unable to feed themselves from the irrigated plots they were allotted and were therefore dependent on food aid. They spoke of indignity, bodily discomfort, and the severance of meaningful social relations. This article discusses the contrast between the information generated by the different research methods and asks how this tension relates to two major narratives about development: development as a process through which the state actualizes a national dream, and development as a process that creates affluence for some by impoverishing others.

This article reviews the history of defamation cases involving Africans in Southern Rhodesia. Two precedent-setting cases, one in 1938 and the other in 1946, provided a legal rationale for finding defamation that rested on the ability of litigants to prove they had been shamed. The testimony and evidence of these cases, both of which involved government employees, tracks how colonial rule was altering hierarchy and changing definitions of honor, often to the bewilderment of the litigants themselves. Importantly, both cases concluded that African employees of the state deserved special protection from defamation. The article then traces how the rules and ambiguities resulting from the legal logic of the 1938 and 1946 cases gave a wider group of litigants such as clerks, police, clergy, and teachers room to maneuver in the courtroom where they also claimed their professional honor. Such litigants perfectly understood the expectations of the court and performed accordingly by recounting embarrassing, even painful, experiences, all to validate their personal and professional honor in court. Such performances raise the question of how we might use court records to write a history of the emotional costs to people who used astute strategies that rested on dishonorable revelations to win their cases.

The problem of armed crime in late twentieth-century Nigeria was closely connected to the events of the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970). Legal records from the secessionist Republic of Biafra reveal how violent crime emerged as part of the military confrontation between Biafra and Nigeria. The wide availability of firearms, the Biafran state’s diminishing ability to enforce the law, and the gradual collapse of Biafra’s economy under the pressure of a Nigerian blockade made Biafran soldiers and civilians reliant on their weapons to obtain food and fuel, make claims to property, and settle disputes with one another. Criminal legal records illustrate how military technologies shape interactions and relationships in the places where they are deployed, and how those dynamics can endure after the war comes to an end. This speaks to larger theoretical questions about the symbolic and functional meanings of guns during and after wartime.