Colonial institutions are thought to be highly persistent, but measuring that persistence is difficult. Using a text analysis method that allows us to measure similarity between bodies of text, we examine the extent to which one formal institution – the penal code – has retained colonial language in seven West African countries. We find that the contemporary penal codes of most countries retain little colonial language. Additionally, we find that it is not meaningful to speak of institutional divergence across the unit of French West Africa, as there is wide variation in the legislative post-coloniality of individual countries. We present preliminary analyses explaining this variation and show that the amount of time that a colony spent under colonisation correlates with more persistent colonial institutions.

In the years following Rwanda's civil war, the country has remembered those killed in the 1994 genocide with 100 days of official commemoration, known as Kwibuka. The temporary commemoration period is characterised by an explicit acknowledgement and public discussion of ethnic identity, which stands in puzzling contrast to the state's policy of ethnic non-recognition, enforced during the rest of the year in hopes of achieving national homogeneity (Ndi Umunyarwanda). Thus, one observes seemingly diametrically opposed practices of legally erasing identity groups because of their link to conflict and a unique, three month-long saturation of reminders in the form of public speeches, memorial programming and burials, and commemorative signage. A blurring of ‘Tutsi’ with ‘survivor’ and the deliberate passing down of survivor identity to Tutsi youth have created, over time, conditions for a ‘survivor nationalism’, which exacerbates social tensions and risks sustainable peace in the long term.

Why are some diverse communities in sub-Saharan Africa able to achieve mutually beneficial collective action while others remain trapped in social dilemmas? This paper argues that inter-group trust plays an important role in explaining when and where communities succeed in collective endeavours. It develops an argument that illustrates how demographic contextual variables structure patterns of inter-group trust and prospects for local goods provision in diverse communities. It then assesses the argument by analysing community policing in two heterogeneous neighbourhoods in Cape Town, South Africa. The paper demonstrates how crosscutting cleavage structures in one Cape Town suburb bolstered the development of inter-group trust across the community, thus helping the community garner participation in community policing. It also documents how reinforcing cleavage structures in another Cape Town suburb has helped to suppress the development of inter-group trust, making the resolution of collective action problems more difficult.

This article explores attitudes of Ghanaian traders towards an increasing Chinese influx into Ghanaian trading spaces and the impacts of Chinese merchants on Ghanaian traders and trading spaces. Despite a late entrance of Chinese merchants into Ghanaian trading spaces relative to Lebanese, Indians and Nigerians, the abrupt change in size of the Chinese trading community along with its huge capital and cheap goods have had big impacts on local trading spaces. We maintain that relations between Ghanaian traders and Chinese counterparts may be roughly described as complementary, collaborative and competitive. While the Chinese impacts are seen as positive by some Ghanaian traders and landlords, they are negative for others. Yet, we argue that these relations are also nuanced and rooted in each Ghanaian trader's position amidst the Chinese presence. This article contributes to the literature on dynamics of South-to-South movements. It adds to growing studies on contemporary Chinese emigrations and accompanying impacts in host communities.

This paper discusses the principal findings of a new integrated dataset of transnational armed conflict in Africa. Existing Africa conflict datasets have systematically under-represented the extent of cross-border state support to belligerent parties in internal armed conflicts as well as the number of incidents of covert cross-border armed intervention and incidents of using armed force to threaten a neighbouring state. Based on the method of ‘redescribing’ datapoints in existing datasets, notably the Uppsala Conflict Data Project, the Transnational Conflict in Africa (TCA) data include numerous missing incidents of transnational armed conflict and reclassify many more. The data indicate that (i) trans-nationality is a major feature of armed conflict in Africa, (ii) most so-called ‘civil wars’ are internationalised and (iii) the dominant definitions of ‘interstate conflict’ and ‘civil war’ are too narrow to capture the particularities of Africa's wars. While conventional interstate war remains rare, interstate rivalry using military means is common. The dataset opens up a research agenda for studying the drivers, patterns and instruments of African interstate rivalries. These findings have important implications for conflict prevention, management and resolution policies.

This article aims to rekindle the debate on the politics of aid in the increasingly common – yet still under-studied – authoritarian and low-intensity conflict settings, detailing the case of Ethiopia in 2016, when a 50-year drought coincided with a wave of protests and a state of emergency. During four months of qualitative fieldwork in 2017, state, civil society, Ethiopian and international actors were approached – from humanitarian headquarters to communities in the Amhara, Oromiya and Somali regions. Research participants relayed stark discrepancies between the humanitarian theatre's ‘frontstage’, where disaster responders showcase an exemplary response, and its ‘backstage’, where they remove their frontstage masks and reflect on the information, the decision-making monopoly of the state and the intrusion of conflict dynamics into the humanitarian response. In humanitarian research and in policy, a collective conversation is necessary on where to draw the line between respect for governments’ sovereignty and the intrusion of humanitarian principles.

The restoration of the Kabaka of Buganda a quarter century after its abolition was the unexpected and contested product of different views of Ganda social structure that had emerged over several centuries. Competing groups, despite acting on contradictory cultural principles, overcame the suspicion of a newly empowered central government. Selective recall of cultural norms and adroit organisational tactics of the individuals who recreated the Buganda Kingdom Government allowed them to surpass their rivals and become the main Ganda interlocutors with the central government. They persuaded the central government to restore the king, though not the kingdom. The compromise they struck permitted the king to be cultural, but not political. Not only did that raise further questions about the meaning of Ganda culture, it constrained the Buganda Kingdom Government's ability to promote Ganda interests with the central government and on occasion reduced its support from the Ganda public in the years following restoration.

This article examines the relationship between politicians and the police in the days before the shooting by members of the South African Police Service of 34 striking mineworkers at the Marikana platinum mine in South Africa on 16 August 2012. Drawing on evidence presented to the official inquiry into events at Marikana, it argues that political influence over the police may be exercised most effectively when it is least obvious. Instead of issuing directives, or openly exerting pressure on the police, it is suggested that politicians may secure compliance with their wishes when chief officers share their priorities, and act accordingly. The senior officers in command at Marikana did not need to be told what to do. In ordering an intervention that led to 34 deaths they were behaving as conscious political actors attuned to the needs of a dominant elite aligned to the ruling African National Congress.

This paper provides an ethnographic perspective on the street-level deliberations of Kenya's opposition supporters between the 2013 and 2017 elections, arguing that rather than appeals to ethnicity what defines its discourse are broader, inclusive notions of political membership. A civic nationalism is enunciated by opposition supporters that congeals support between multiple ethnic groups through its emphasis on universal values – democracy, due process, equality, adherence to the constitution. However, when such civic ideas are used in political campaigning and mobilising rhetoric, describing a resurgent Kenyan ‘people’ that has been systematically disenfranchised, they take on an exclusionary character. As ‘good constitutionalists’, opposition supporters contrast themselves with ‘bad nationalists’ associated with the government, portrayed as mobilising particularistic ethnic loyalties at the expense of a majority of Kenyans. In practice, their civic ideas remain only potentially inclusive.

This study asks: in the general absence of a functioning and effective civil administration in Juba's huge suburbs, how have people negotiated personal disputes and neighbourhood management since conflict began in 2013? Who arbitrates in Juba, and on what terms? This study challenges top-down analyses that see political-military elites managing their ethnic enclaves of followers and fighters through nepotism and gifts. Such patronage requires the complex negotiation of responsibilities and rights, including over community safety and order. In Juba, the local authorities who mediate this have been built by men and women with extensive expertise and connections in South Sudan's long history of ‘civil-military’ governance systems. These local authorities have established lasting institutions by negotiating rights to residence in, arbitrating over, and knowing the human geography of their neighbourhoods. Their authority is rooted in this deep politics, drawing on their detailed knowledge of topographies of power in these multi-ethnic, highly military neighbourhood spaces.

Why would rural Malian women express interest in political participation? Mali implemented a gender quota during the 2016 local elections. In a rural village where I conducted immersive research, the majority of women I interviewed following the 2016 poll expressed interest in running for local office in the future. Scholars of women's political participation theorise that quotas bring women to elected office and increase women's political participation. These theoretical perspectives cannot fully explain why women in rural Mali would express enthusiastic interest in political participation. These women participate extensively in savings and credit associations. Drawing on data generated through engagement with women in their daily lives, I explore how economic advancement can shape women's participatory aspirations. Examining longer-term changes in the local political economy of this rural village provides a deeper understanding of why women responded positively to a new institutional opening for political participation.

Switzerland is usually not looked upon as a substantial economic actor in Africa. Taking Zambian copper as a case study, we show how important Swiss companies have become in the global commodities trade and the services it depends on. While big Swiss trading firms such as Glencore and Trafigura have generated increasing scholarly and public interest, a multitude of Swiss companies is involved in logistics and transport of Zambian copper. Swiss extractivism, we argue, is a model case for trends in today's global capitalism. We highlight that servicification, a crucial element of African mining regimes today, creates new and more flexible opportunities for international companies to capture value in global production networks. These opportunities partly rely on business-friendly regulation and tax regimes in Northern countries, a fact which makes companies potentially vulnerable to reputation risks and offers opportunities to civil society actors criticising their role. New and different Swiss–Zambian connections emerge from civil society networks organising around companies’ economic activities.

Focusing on three Ghanaian football academies, this article examines the role that dreams and aspirations play in shaping development schemes and in determining their impact. Football ignites the hopes and imaginations of entrepreneurs, aspiring players, their parents and supporters, and these aspirations serve as a blueprint for action both among founders and participants of academies. Imagined futures give birth to development initiatives, attracting participants, and providing them with opportunities to articulate their own aspirations. The following examination argues that it is vital for researchers and practitioners to understand how a variety of imagined futures comes into play in development schemes, as the conflicts and negotiations between divergent imaginaries can explain why individuals engage with development, how schemes evolve and how they leave their mark upon communities.

This article examines the distribution of power among public, private and criminal interests invested in Mombasa port. It approaches Kenya as a gatekeeper state, in which national elites compete to control the country's points of interaction with the rest of the world. Mombasa's controversial private dry ports are used to highlight (1) how the opportunity to profit from inefficiencies in container storage has been distributed among the political elite, and (2) how the development of the country's principal seaport not only reflects Kenya's underlying political settlements, but is one of the key sites in which those settlements are tested and reshaped. The case exposes a dynamic interaction between Kenya's shifting political settlement on the one hand, and the gate itself – Mombasa port's physical infrastructure and regulations – on the other.

This article argues against the long-standing instinct to read African politics in terms of programmatic versus patrimonial politics. Unlike the assumptions of much of the current quantitative literature, there are substantive political struggles that go beyond ‘public goods good, private goods bad’. Scholarly framings serve to obscure the essentially contested nature of what counts as legitimate distribution. This article uses the recent political history of the Lagos Model in south-west Nigeria to show that the idea of patrimonial versus programmatic politics does not stand outside of politics but is in itself a politically constructed distinction. In adopting it a priori as scholars we commit ourselves to seeing the world through the eyes of a specific, often elite, constituency that makes up only part of the rich landscape of normative political contestation in Nigeria. Finally, the example of a large-scale empowerment scheme in Oyo State shows the complexity of politicians’ attempts to render distribution legitimate to different audiences at once.

Cameroon's autocrat, Paul Biya, declared war on Boko Haram in 2014. Using a variety of ethnographic materials, this article examines the politics of rumours and conspiracy theories that have defined the popular response to this war in Cameroon. It underlines the mobilising force of these rumours on intra-elite struggles within the national context as well as on international relations, particularly on French–Cameroon relations. I argue that rumour-mongering is a central mode of production of suspicion in times of war and social crisis. Yet, the current rumours in the wake of the war against Boko Haram in Cameroon are inscribed within a historical framework of a state-directed politics of paranoia that seeks to define ‘enemies of destabilisation’. In the end, this politics of suspicion also works to bring otherwise disaffected Cameroonians to support the autocratic Paul Biya as a victim of foreign plots for regime change in Cameroon.

This article investigates how the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front's (EPRDF) attempt to build a developmental state influenced and shaped its relationships with the Ethiopian private sector. Through a case study of the chambers of commerce system in Ethiopia, the research reveals that the EPRDF's relationship to the private sector was characterised by the twin objectives of (1) curbing the private sector's power to prevent challenges to the EPRDF rule and (2) mobilising the private sector as part of the ruling coalition's developmental state programme. However, these twin objectives, were, in several cases, perceived as mutually exclusive by the EPRDF which, at times, led to a focus on control at the expense of developmental objectives. The ensuing lack of embeddedness posed problems for the operationalisation of the developmental state policies, reducing the EPRDF's ability to institutionalise collaborative relationships with the private sector.

Gambian irregular migration is a phenomenon that is well known and discussed within this small African nation, yet little is understood of the deep personal and socio-cultural motives to embark on the perilous journey across the Sahara towards Europe. This paper explores the ambitions and capabilities of Gambians who embark on irregular migration, or the so-called ‘backway’.

This paper investigates the quest for legitimacy conducted by hereditary, traditional leaders in dual legitimacy systems. We theorise that traditional leaders engage in meta-constitutional bargaining, i.e. bargaining among constitutionally and traditionally defined actors within the meta-constitutional space. This process resembles constitutional bargaining in federations over the institutional balance between the members and centre, and among members. We thus propose a parallel between the theory of federal bargaining, on the one hand, and, on the other, the process of institutional balancing between agents in constitutional and traditional authority structures in dual legitimacy systems. Evidence from narratives of institutional balancing between constitutional and traditional authorities in Southern Africa suggests that actors’ strategies in dual legitimacy systems accord with the framework here. The narratives also disclose that both constitutional and traditional authorities rely on the state's courts for adjudication. The paper enriches social science scholarship on traditional authority, political economy and federalism.

In 2015, South Sudan increased the number of its states from 10 to 28, followed by four more states in 2017. The redrawing of internal borders came through presidential decree as South Sudan's violent civil war continued to unfold. This development has led to two ardent voices: one arguing to maintain the new states, and another advocating to reverse them. Applying argumentation theory and critical discourse analysis to news articles, analysis pieces, and press releases collected from Gurtong and Sudan Tribune from July 2015 to April 2017, this article assesses the argument advanced by both camps and evaluates their implications for peace in South Sudan. In examining the claim, the counter-claim, and their underlying premises, the article finds areas of contention and convergence between the two camps and argues for the compatibility of the values which undergird both positions.