This paper explores the Economic Community of West African States’ (ECOWAS) citizenship regime by investigating the institutional perceptions of five departments of the ECOWAS Commission. Creating a citizenship regime has been a central objective of the organisation's institutional framework but previous research has refrained from examining its multiplicity. The paper uses the concept of citizenship regime consisting of the dimensions rights, access, belonging and responsibility mix as the conceptual lens and draws on institutional documents and primary data from interviews conducted at the ECOWAS Commission. The paper contributes to current debates in citizenship studies and African regionalism and the literature on supra-national citizenship building, regional integration and governance research in Africa and elsewhere. The empirical data show that movement is central to the ECOWAS citizenship regime, whether formulated in terms of a right, as a way to facilitate access, or a way to establish a sense of regional belonging.

In the heat of the decolonisation struggles of the 2000s, there has been little space or tolerance for conceptual criticism of this important moment in global history. Using the South African case, this article outlines some of the dilemmas of decolonisation as a concept and method for dealing with legacy knowledge in the aftermath of colonialism and apartheid. The status of whites as citizens rather than colonials, the lack of determination of meanings of decolonisation within public universities, and the defanging of a potentially radical concept are among the concerns raised in this critical work on the uptake of the idea in post-apartheid society. What this criticism points to is the need for a theory of institutions when dealing with radical curriculum change rather than a politics that relies so much on the rhetorical, the symbolic and the performative in the demand for decolonisation.

Communities inhabiting the arid and semi-arid areas of eastern Africa have long suffered from and engaged in pastoral conflicts. However, since some countries in the region became oil producers, the conditions affecting pastoral conflicts have changed. This study examines how oil extraction may influence pastoral conflicts by using a survey experiment conducted in Turkana County, Kenya, on a sample of 801 respondents. The study finds that overall, respondents’ perceived risks of pastoral conflicts decrease when they are primed about the consequences of oil extraction leading to fundamental changes in pastoral livelihoods, such as an increase in employment opportunities in the oil sector and rapid social changes. The residents of Turkana view pastoral conflicts as customary as long as pastoralism continues and fundamental changes to pastoralism-based livelihoods originating from oil discovery and extraction may lead to a decrease in the pastoralist population engaging in pastoral conflicts.

Over the last decade, a new developmentalism has taken root across Africa, centred on promoting local production and industrialisation. One unintended consequence of this has been the proliferation of economically nationalist policy measures that have increasingly come into tension with the aims of regional integration in Africa. This article sets out to offer insights as to why these tensions are emerging by focusing on the East African Community (EAC) and the growing trend of economic nationalism among its members. Contrary to what rationalist and structuralist accounts might presume, this article argues that this rise in economic nationalism is instead reflective of a weakening of the discursive imperative – or social purpose – that had initially converged various actors around the EAC's integration agenda when revived in 2000. While drawing from the EAC's experience, it concludes by highlighting a broader legitimacy dilemma facing African regional organisations within this ‘new developmentalism’.

This article reflects on the effects of the recent mining boom on the (trans-)formation of the state in D.R. Congo. To do so, it proposes to integrate macro- and micro- approaches to the political economy of mining into a broader analysis of the power practices of actors at different levels of the state apparatus. Taking the copper mining sector as a case study, it explores the various means by which the presidency, provincial authorities and customary chiefs have drawn resources from mining in the period from the early 2000s to the present. This analysis highlights the various resources that state actors at different levels use to assert their authority over foreign mining companies. From a broader perspective, it shows that, although the liberalisation of the mining sector has opened up new revenue opportunities for all these actors, it has not resulted in a significant power redistribution between them.

This article examines the gacaca trials of women accused of perpetrating the Rwandan genocide, asking whether and how ideas about their gender impacted their defences, testimonies and experiences as defendants. It uses court reports of the trials of 91 accused women; a set of sources that provides novel insights into the role of gender in an African transitional justice system. These sources reveal that ideas about gender – particularly female peacefulness and passivity – were commonly invoked by both accused women and wider trial participants. These gendered ideas not only helped women to achieve acquittals, but they also contributed to the Rwandan state's construction of a ‘truth’ narrative that ordinary Rwandan women are not capable of genocide violence. Additionally, women's trials reveal a further function of the gacaca process: as a political tool that made moral judgements about contemporary Rwandan women's domestic roles and place within the household.

Africa's plural legal systems are often doubly bad for women: reinforcing patriarchal threads in indigenous practices while layering male-dominated Anglo-European laws atop. While these systems generally work to their detriment, women are sometimes able to take advantage of them. Under what conditions are women able to ‘win’ in Africa's plural legal systems? I examine women's interactions with the plural colonial court systems in the Gold Coast and Senegal. Based on an analysis of original court records in each country, I argue that women are more likely to win in plural legal systems in areas of operational ambiguity where applicable legal principles are contradictory. Leveraging this ambiguity enabled women in the Gold Coast and Senegal to win rights around inheritance and divorce, respectively. These victories were codified post-independence, though women face social pressures against exercising them.

For the first time in its history, Ghana held a referendum in 2018 to divide some of its regions to create new ones. Though the regions are purely administrative, the division faced resistance in some areas and not in others. This study combines qualitative comparative analysis with process tracing to show that the resistance occurred within regions with relatively high support for the opposition party, but only in the combined presence of (traditional) elites competing from either side of the region and controversies regarding claims to (traditional) political authority. Further, it finds a bottom-up mechanism of the resistance, evolving as the threatened interests of stakeholders grew from the community to the regional, national and diaspora levels. As in other African cases, this suggests that the sources of conflicts in Africa are not so much about ethnic differences but more about elites’ unequal access to political and economic resources.

The concept of ‘agency’ and its role in capturing the dynamics between Africa and external actors feature increasingly in the African IR scholarship. Over the past decade, Turkey has become an increasingly prominent actor in Africa, strengthening political, cultural and economic ties with African states and providing humanitarian aid and development assistance. In this paper, we examine Turkey's relationship with Africa from the point of view of African agency and ask ‘How much and what kind of agency can we identify by examining the way in which Turkey approaches African states?’ The conventional understanding of the concept of African agency defines it in materialist terms and emphasises its transactional nature; it does not adequately explain incidents of enhanced outcomes for Africans in their relationship with Turkey. We argue that an under-examined aspect and a vital source of African agency lies within the discourses of Turkish policy which provide an enabling source of policy space for negotiation for Africans. We demonstrate that the notion of Muslim kinship in Turkish discourses not only distinguishes Turkey from most of the other external powers engaging with the continent but also enables African interlocutors to negotiate enhanced outcomes.

Much attention has been paid to the growth of Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity in Uganda and the way it has shifted over the past decades from being a minority religion to influencing and shaping the Ugandan public and political spheres. Most of the literature, however, associates the Pentecostal-charismatic dynamic public action with its motivation to promote conservative Christian values, especially around issues of sexuality, HIV/AIDS, reproduction and family values. This article extends this literature by providing a fuller explanation for the reasons behind its public transformation and its relation to power, in particular its loyalty to and support for President Museveni. Drawing on participant observation and interviews conducted over several years, this article argues that along with theological and moral explanations, it is important to understand how local and contextual dynamics interplay. Indeed, the uncertainties and memories of the difficult origins of the Pentecostal-charismatic movement and the lack of legal recognition as fully registered churches, still impact on the present and motivate them to be catalytic socio-political actors in need of forging strong connections with centres of power in Museveni's Uganda.

Since Kenya's independence in 1963, ethnicity has been an important factor in Kenyan politics and everyday life. While recent research has shown that ethnic favouritism impacted the allocation of educational resources in the past, so far, no systematic research has been conducted on how teachers exacerbate, mitigate or countervail the political culture of ethnicity and ethnic favouritism. As agents of socialisation, teachers’ attitudes and behaviour can, consciously or unconsciously, convey the message that ethnic favouritism is normal and socially acceptable, or conversely delegitimise such practices. Based on a list experiment among 894 secondary school teachers in the county of Nairobi, we find that at least 25% of teachers have already favoured coethnic pupils. Interviews indicate that such favours are seldom blatant in nature and mainly serve to show solidarity with one's kin. Still, even small – frequently well-intentioned – favours may damage inter-group attitudes, trust and relations, and may even contribute to the persistence of ethnic politics.

The article examines two decades of Jerry Rawlings’ rule in Ghana. It seeks to explain why Rawlings’ revolutionary populism did not develop in the direction that he envisaged: a new kind of popular democracy. Instead, Rawlings oversaw the reintroduction of Ghana's popularly preferred political system: ‘Western-style’ multi-party democracy, despite his avowed intention of not doing so. To what extent was this outcome surprising or puzzling? The article explains that it was neither surprising nor puzzling as Rawlings’ regime, the PNDC, lacked the capacity to introduce a radical new political system, despite his desire to do so. His aim – to craft a new kind of popular democracy – was not achievable as both internal and external opposition forces were stronger in their desire for multi-party democracy and a neo-liberal economic system.

Culture is a central concept in the social sciences. It is also difficult to examine rigorously. I study the oldest university in East Africa and a cradle of political elites, Makerere University, where halls of residence developed distinct cultures in the 1970s such that some hall cultures are activist (e.g. Lumumba Hall) while others are respectful to authorities (e.g. Livingstone Hall) even though assignment to halls has been random since 1970. I leverage this unique setting to understand how culture forms and affects the values and behaviours of young adults. Participant observation, interviews and archives suggest that cultural differences arose from critical junctures that biased group (hall) composition and from intergroup (inter-hall) competition. Hall governments promote cultural and institutional persistence through the intergenerational transmission of norms and practices, thereby highlighting the role of political hierarchy in reproducing culture.

This article examines the impact of the pandemic on ride-hailing drivers and their mitigation strategies during lockdown in Africa. Ride-hailing has emerged as one of the latest paid-work opportunities for the continent's many unemployed. Yet, ride-hailing companies such as Uber and Bolt misclassify drivers to avoid regulation and responsibilities towards workers’ welfare. Drawing on 34 in-depth interviews with ride-hailing drivers, driver representatives and trade unions in South Africa and Kenya, this article makes two arguments. First, the gig economy in Africa provides work opportunities for the unemployed on the continent and simultaneously vitiates the working conditions through the commodification and informalisation of work. Second, the state-directed emergency measures act as a veneer to capital's efforts to commodify labour and the gig economy platforms have emerged as primary tools for it. Our account points to an urgent need for better regulatory systems to hold platform companies accountable and a collective bargaining mechanism in the gig economy.

In the early 1960s, three pilot agricultural and settlement schemes were set up along the shores of Lake Victoria in the north-western region of Tanzania with the involvement of Israeli development agency Agridev. One of these sites was Mbarika, where the experimental project ran for three years and had mixed results before being discontinued by the young Tanzanian government. This article explores the story of that scheme and its long-term legacies some 50 years on. Unpacking the representational and material ruinations that outlived the project's official timeline, we examine the memories and rumours that continue to haunt the site to this day and their entanglement with successive development experiences and shifting political ideologies. Through interviews, ethnographic observations and archival research, we shed light on the complex, deeply ambiguous legacies and ‘afterlives’ of a development intervention set between expectations of modernity and a sense of exclusion.

Due to the centrality of education to economic growth and social development, successive governments in post-colonial Ghana have implemented policies to improve the quality of education in the country. In line with this, Ghana embarked on its first major education reform in 1987 under the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) government. While several studies have been conducted to explain this reform, these studies have largely been descriptive and theoretically, have over relied on the conditionality thesis. Our study draws on ideational literature and research interviews to offer an alternative explanation of the 1987 reform. Drawing extensively on the ideational concepts of bricolage and translation and focusing on the actors using these two mechanisms, the study argues that, while exogenous forces did impact the 1987 reform, it was mainly driven by endogenous factors featuring both path dependent and departing changes.

Relatively few longitudinal studies have been undertaken of change and development among rural communities in Africa. Drawing on field-based research conducted over almost five decades, the article examines the shocks and adaptive strategies experienced in the remote rural community of Kayima in north-eastern Sierra Leone. In coping with both external and internal shocks and displaying a remarkable level of resilience, there has however been very little improvement in community livelihoods, and it is suggested that it is a case of ‘resilience without development’. It is likely that the findings of the study could have wider relevance among rural communities elsewhere in Africa.

Unaccompanied child and youth migrants negotiate with local host communities in their attempts to find a place to belong to, yet research has generally neglected their participation in the making of relationships with the people around them. Providing a perspective of the longue durée, the Zimbabwean–South African borderland teaches us that time is critical in young migrants’ ability to negotiate their positioning and actively shape relationships with host communities, based on mutual interest. While at the beginning of their stay, unaccompanied children and youth were at the mercy of others, time enabled them to accumulate knowledge and develop skills that were in demand, shifting their place in society and setting the ground for conviviality.

Pierre Nkurunziza died in 2020, just a few months short of completing his tenure as the first post-civil war President of Burundi. Critics have cast him as yet another rebel-turned-politician who came to office on a promise of a democratic transformation but became progressively authoritarian, particularly during his third, disputed term in office. As a political figure, however, Nkurunziza remains poorly understood. What kind of a worldview motivated his politics? Drawing on critical discourse analysis, we identify three recurring themes in Nkurunziza's key political speeches: anti-colonialism; unity and self-sufficiency; and discourse around ‘politics of a new beginning’. These themes were stable across time, indicating Nkurunziza's consistent worldview, but became more pronounced and radical as he faced growing challenges to his legitimacy from within and without. Far from being confined to rhetoric, the themes also manifested in concrete policy decisions, underscoring the urgent need to take ideology seriously in understanding the political trajectories of African leaders.