The Republic of Guinea is located in a particularly turbulent region. However, while several conflicts in neighbouring countries – Guinea-Bissau, Liberia and Sierra Leone – have spilled over Guinea's borders, the country's central government has displayed a seemingly unlikely stability. Until a bloodless coup in December 2008 brought a military junta to power, the country had had only two presidents since independence, both of whom died of natural causes while still in office. Ahmed Sékou Touré, Guinea's first leader, deftly used the anti-colonial insurgency in neighbouring Guinea-Bissau to enhance his political credentials and control domestic and international opposition. The administration of the late President Lansana Conté leveraged regional warfare to solidify its command over remote provinces, increase government revenues, bolster military capacity, and improve regional diplomatic relations. This paper supports the analysis of civil wars as regional phenomena, while shedding light on mechanisms that may interact in counter-intuitive ways with the dynamics of state strength.

This article uses interviews with former student activists in Sierra Leone to explore what ideals motivate students to participate in political action. In Sierra Leone, students used the military as a cover for their own democratic programme, initially by encouraging a coup that they wanted to partake in, later by joining the officer corps themselves. I challenge the notion that student interactions with the urban lumpenproletariat and ‘militariat’ serve as evidence for their desire to cloak a lack of ideals in popular violence; rather I argue that coalitions are built as needs must to push a particular agenda, whether or not the agenda is known to all participants. In this case, that agenda was to ensure that an idealistic intelligentsia had economic and political futures that they had been denied under a paternalistic dictatorship. In essence student activism was elitist, not popular.

The recent involvement of China in sub-Saharan Africa is challenging and changing the world geostrategic scene. In the article, we analyse the agreements between the Congolese government and a group of Chinese state-owned enterprises. A number of public infrastructure works will be financed with Chinese loans. To guarantee reimbursement, a Congolese/Chinese joint venture will be created to extract and sell copper, cobalt and gold. These are the biggest trade/investment agreements that China has so far signed in Africa. This article seeks to contribute to the discussion regarding the agreement's impact on internal development in Congo. Does it create a ‘win-win’ situation for all, or is it an unequal exchange? We outline the internal and international debates and analyse several noteworthy characteristics of the agreements. In conclusion, we present a balanced view on the likely impact on Congo's short-term and long-term development.

The pressures of economic crisis and reform that have gripped African societies have been accompanied by a proliferation of new religious movements. Amid concerns about the political impact of religious revivalism, little attention has been devoted to their economic implications. Focusing on the remarkable coincidence between the withdrawal of the state, the rise of religious movements, and the dramatic expansion of the informal economy, this paper examines the role of religious revivalism in processes of informal economic governance and class formation in contemporary Africa. Against the background of the historical role of religion in the development of market institutions across the continent, it traces the dynamics of religious revivalism and informal economic regulation in two regions of Nigeria. Rather than representing a return to occultist or patrimonial impulses, new religious movements reveal distinctly Weberian tendencies. However, modernising tendencies fostered within the informal economy by popular religious revivalism are being stunted by the relentless pressures of liberalisation, globalisation and pseudo-democratisation. Progressive religious tendencies among the poor are being instrumentalised by religious entrepreneurs and political elites, undermining fragile processes of entrepreneurial class formation taking place within the informal economy.

China's 21st-century re-entry into Africa has been made with considerable new fanfare and in a manner that contrasts sharply with the Maoist ideologist policy of the 1960s. However, how the Chinese perceive Africa, as expressed by the online community, has been little studied. In a country where full democracy and complete freedom of expression are still lacking, online communication arguably plays a particularly significant role. When it comes to topics in China which are not frequently addressed in the public domain, the flow of information among the online community is paramount in shaping public perceptions. The result of systematic qualitative research on the online community in China, this paper aims to bridge the gap between formal studies of Sino-African relations and online perceptions. Reconstructing the online image of Africa is essential in understanding not only contemporary Sino-African relations from the popular perspective but also the distorted nature of information that circulates in Chinese cyberspace.

The ‘non-electoral context’ of elections is often overlooked in democratisation studies, in order not to obscure an otherwise clear model or theory of transition. A key challenge for research on democratisation processes is to balance electoral ‘formalities’ with contextual factors, qualitative perceptions and non-electoral issues, in order to reach a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of democratic transitions. This article advocates a multilayered approach to – or a ‘thick description’ of – elections, as this will capture the diversity of real life experiences and expose alternative power discourses competing with the electoralist one in influencing the path of democratisation. In so doing, it casts light on the crucial impact of the Eritrean–Ethiopian war on Ethiopia's 2005 election, in addition to other qualitative and contextual factors, which lead to the conclusion that the advancement of democracy through multiparty elections in Ethiopia under the Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) has failed.