Why did Ebola response initiatives in the Upper Guinea Forest Region regularly encounter resistance, occasionally violent? Extending existing explanations concerning local and humanitarian “culture” and “structural violence,” and drawing on previous anthropological fieldwork and historical and documentary research, this article argues that Ebola disrupted four intersecting but precarious social accommodations that had hitherto enabled radically different and massively unequal worlds to coexist. The disease and the humanitarian response unsettled social accommodations that had become established between existing burial practices and hospital medicine, local political structures and external political subjection, mining interests and communities, and those suspected of “sorcery” and those suspicious of them.

In the last years of Idi Amin’s reign, modern dance was introduced at Namasagali College, a Catholic boarding school in rural Uganda, as a means of encouraging modern, liberal self-awareness in students. Drawing on interviews with Namasagali’s former headmaster, teachers, and students, this article offers the first scholarly consideration of this important school, and contextualizes its modern dance curriculum within Africa’s historical modernity/modernization problematic. The school’s progressive educational program, with its focus on creative exploration and ownership of the body, was framed within a neocolonial regimen of discipline and punishment that aimed to drill modern behavior into students. In its clashing modes of government, this school exhibited contradictions that have perennially troubled Western liberal intervention in Africa.

This paper advances a resource mobilization perspective on the 2011–12 electoral protests in Senegal based on social movement theory. Motivational explanations, in the form of grievance accounts, have already been used to explain successful protest mobilization in this case. Here the emphasis is placed on organizational efforts and the financial and human resources behind social movements. Using this approach to analyze the rise and fall of the social movement created to protest against President Abdoulaye Wade reveals its strategic role for opposition parties and their leaders. These findings add nuance to the perception of a democratic revolution in Senegal.

Challenging the scholarship on the relationship between natural resources and civil society, this article advances a framework that differentiates the various types of protests surrounding mineral extraction in sub-Saharan Africa and explains how this extraction encourages contentious activity. On the basis of protest event data from thirty-nine countries in SSA for the 1990–2006 period, as well as available survey data, the article provides confirming evidence that mineral wealth increases protest activity.

Joel Barkan’s interest in Kenya as a high school student inspired a lifetime’s commitment to the country and wider East African region, reflected in his three edited volumes comparing political, economic, and policy developments in Kenya and Tanzania, his work as USAID’s Regional Democracy and Governance Advisor in the early 1990s, and his continuing engagement with the country’s political development through his work at CSIS and his role as founder and chair of the Kenya Working Group, the Washington, D.C.–based lobbying group.

Joel Barkan’s work as the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Regional Democracy and Governance Advisor for Eastern and Southern Africa brought both realism and conceptual strengthening to democracy promotion, most notably giving legitimacy and practical meaning to the concept of civil society as an essential dimension of democratization.

Joel Barkan surveyed Ugandan university students’ attitudes in 1966 and worked on Ugandan national governance three decades later. These two inquiries facilitate an unusual counterfactual analysis. Counterfactuals typically test historical explanation by manipulating an antecedent to estimate change to a known outcome. But a counterfactual can be constructed to examine how an antecedent would react to a later activity. By extrapolating from 1966 students’ responses to Barkan’s survey and their expected knowledge of political events, we can estimate their likely attitudes to later governance. Applying this unconventional counterfactual helps establish how far prior perception of politics illuminates later governmental practice.

Joel Barkan had a special interest in decentralization and local development. He was persuaded that decentralization, and devolution in particular, had the potential of addressing Kenya’s longstanding challenges in regard to equity, ethnic inequalities, inclusion, and service delivery. Although political patronage and ethnic interests historically had hindered efforts to introduce decentralization, Kenya’s 2010 Constitution promised a devolved system of government to address regional imbalances in development, promote equitable access to basic services, and give powers of self-governance to the people. Will devolution under the 2010 Constitution succeed, or will it fail just like the other initiatives before it?

Compared to political developments in Eastern Europe and Latin America, democratization in sub-Saharan Africa has been more problematic and uneven. Looking at the performance in four subregions—central Africa, East Africa, southern Africa, and West Africa—yields no convincing evidence of a “wave” of democratization; countries next to each other differ considerably with regard to their Freedom House scores. This does not mean that democratization has necessarily stalled, but it does demonstrate that the prevailing vertical cleavages along ethnic, racial, or religious lines can make such a transition volatile, as suggested by the cases of Burundi, Mali, and even Kenya. While political competition in mature democracies, typically divided along horizontal group or class lines, tends to generate positive-sum outcomes, such competition in Africa easily turns into “prisoner’s dilemma” games. The uncertainty about the value of cooperation in such situations usually produces political “truces” that are easily abandoned if the costs of adherence exceed the benefits. Against the background of this prevailing political logic, this article calls for a new approach to conceptualizing notions of “institution” and “power” in the analysis of politics in the region.

Few scholars have taught us more about African voters, legislators, and legislatures than Joel Barkan. Drawing on Barkan’s analysis, the first part of this article argues that the African one-party state can be usefully viewed as a competitive-authoritarian system underpinned by a form of political linkage that allows for elements of coercion and competition. Building on this framework, the second part demonstrates that the political linkage structures that emerged in single-party systems such as those of Kenya, Senegal, and Tanzania have played an important role in shaping the dynamics of multiparty politics and the prospects for democratic reform.

Afrobarometer data collected three decades after Joel Barkan’s pioneering survey of rural Kenyans confirm his insights that voters stress MPs’ linkage roles in terms of representation (carrying views upward to the capital) and constituency service (bringing goods downward from national government) over their institutional roles (lawmaking and oversight). And, contrary to conventional wisdom, they prefer collective goods for the constituency over private goods. An African Legislatures Project survey of 822 MPs in seventeen countries revealed, however, that MPs misinterpret this as a demand for material goods and development and underappreciate the demand for representation, prompting—among other things—the adoption of controversial Constituency Development Funds.