Jihadist groups have found a ‘safe haven’ in northern Mali. They have managed this by operating strategically to establish themselves and to develop relationships with local communities, but characteristics of the environment have also facilitated their development and survival. In northern Mali, the political landscape is fragmented, and replete with competition between the central authority and various groups of local elites, who are themselves divided. I conceptualise this fluid environment as a context that incentivises ‘political nomadism’. Using the Tuareg communities as an entry point, I explore the complex dynamics between local and national political actors and jihadist groups in northern Mali. I argue that the jihadist ‘safe haven’ in northern Mali is highly relational and has been facilitated by the form of political nomadism practiced in the region since the 1990s. The article is based on eight months of fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2017 in Mali and Niger.

In Kenya, the return to the multiparty democracy of the 1990s and the initiation of the Constitutional Review of the early 2000s were two critical junctures that catalysed reform momentum and the development of transnational reform networks. Transnational relations were developed between Kenyan professionals (lawyers and academics among others), their international counterparts, and the local activists representing rural constituencies, so as to influence policymaking during constitutional and land policy reforms. These transnational networks influenced content and shape of land policy narratives by vernacularising the international norms that promote formal recognition of customary land rights. These international norms were not straightforwardly imported into Kenyan policies and statues: intense negotiations amongst actors in policy arenas resulted in their vernacularisation. Kenyan translocal actors appropriated the community land narrative, hybridised and reinterpreted it. This paper documents and analyses how the notion of community land was enshrined in Kenyan policy and constitutional documents through transnational relations. I argue that this notion of community land was shaped to the Kenyan historical and political context, at times defeating the original goal of promoting a property rights model alternative to land privatisation, and at times echoing the colonial category of tribal land, and exclusive territorial control.

Inspired by Bourdieu's field theory and utilising the case of Zambia, this article aims to enhance the understanding of the intricate relationship between Chinese private investors and sub-Saharan state institutions. The study proposes an epistemological framework that integrates sociological, anthropological and neo-institutional approaches to development studies. Through extensive fieldwork and over 75 interviews with both Chinese and Zambian stakeholders, we explore various contexts in which group-actors related to foreign capital in Zambia operate. We argue that three separate habiti – inhabited by the Zambian political class, Chinese investors and ‘ordinary’ Zambians – are crucial for comprehending private foreign capital operations in this sub-Saharan state. The ordinary Zambians and Zambian political class fields converge primarily during elections, while interactions between ordinary Zambians and Chinese investors have remained very limited (predominantly employee–employer relations), creating an ideational structure of hostility. In contrast, the Zambian political class and Chinese private investor fields crosscut and are mutually constitutive.

Many large-scale land acquisition studies focus on the role of powerful transnational corporations, foreign and domestic governments. Instead, we shift the focus to the role of local actors, in this case, pastoralists in Samburu County, Kenya. Here, we apply the concept of ‘intimate exclusion’ and show that pastoralist elites' desire and ability to maximise productive and financial gains from customary land, coupled with their privileged understanding of land-related laws and regulations and ability to use or threaten others with violence, enables the control of extensive customary lands and the exclusion of weaker pastoralists. These processes, we find, are rooted in the country's capitalist development trajectory traceable to colonial rule. Overall, the paper highlights local ‘homegrown’ actors’ role in large-scale land acquisition, how social intimacy provides space and opportunity for unequal benefits and how historical gains offer unique opportunities to gain from new political and economic developments.

While the challenges of family law reform and barriers to justice are widely studied, there is a gap in our understanding of the gendered nature of the use of courts in West Africa. Through analysis of judicial decisions in Courts of First Instance (Tribunaux de Première Instance) in Allada and Cotonou, Benin, this article examines how women and men use lower courts in family law cases. This article finds that despite barriers to access to formal institutions, women use these courts in equal numbers as do men, and they use them for divorce, as well as to claim child custody, child-support and alimony. Men mostly use family law courts to determine paternity and to seek divorce. Despite a widespread lack of confidence in courts and tribunals, these Courts of First Instance are a tool for women to challenge social hierarchy and to claim rights for themselves and their children.

Over the last decade China has become a dominant player in Africa's rapidly growing hydropower sector. These mega projects typically employ thousands of Africans yet research on labour relations at these sites remains extremely limited. This article provides a rare systematic analysis of workers’ experiences on a Chinese-financed-and-constructed hydroelectric dam in Africa. We find that chronic verbal abuse of African workers by Chinese managers is a defining feature of labour relations at this project in Uganda. This abuse has tainted many workers’ attitudes towards the Chinese contractor Sinohydro, the Chinese government, and to a lesser extent Chinese people themselves. Workers also perceive Ugandan organisations and the Ugandan government as complicit in these poor labour relations. These findings underscore the limits of accountability to labour standards by Chinese firms operating in Africa, especially in contexts where host organisations and governments fail to advocate aggressively for the rights of African workers.