This article considers the choices made during the apartheid era by Catholic sisters who were members of one of the largest orders for African women, the Montebello Dominicans, based in KwaZulu-Natal, and one of the smallest orders, the Companions of Saint Angela, based in Soweto, the sprawling African township to the southwest of Johannesburg. The Montebellos took an apolitical stance and embraced “silence,” but they could not avoid the political tensions that defined KwaZulu-Natal. The Companions became activists, whose “disobedience” brought them into direct confrontation with the state. History, region, ethnicity, and timing help explain what it meant for African women religious to be apolitical, and what it meant to be politicized, in the context of state repression so effective that every action could be interpreted as a political act.

Across Africa in the early twenty-first century, autonomous women's movements have transformed the political landscape. With their support, African women are lobbying for constitutional reforms, entering political office in unprecedented numbers, and initiating legislation to expand women's rights. African women's movements have been emboldened by changes in international and regional norms concerning women's rights and representation, a new availability of resources to enhance women's status, and in many places, an end to conflict. In Botswana, the 1980s and 1990s were a period of heightened women's mobilization. Led by the women's organization Emang Basadi, the women's movement accomplished many significant victories, including winning a landmark citizenship case, prompting a comprehensive review of laws to identify instances of gender discrimination, issuing the first women's manifesto in Africa, and organizing workshops for political parties and women candidates. Some scholars have suggested that Emang Basadi's work was responsible not just for increasing women's representation in parliament, but also for broadening democracy in Botswana. Since 2010, however, a once vibrant women's movement has gone quiet. This article seeks to understand this development and to explore how the movement might be revitalized. The article concludes by drawing comparisons with other women's movements in the region and suggesting that the women's movement in Botswana, like others in the region, may be, in the words of one scholar, “in abeyance.”

This article examines how popular organizational strategies and coping mechanisms affect broader trajectories of urban governance in contemporary Africa. Does the proliferation of informal livelihood networks and associations foster economic empowerment and popular political participation, or do these informal processes breed poverty and organizational chaos? This article explores the link between popular organizational strategies and structural outcomes, focusing on how institutional process and power relations shape the access of the poor to resources and decision-making structures in decentralizing urban environments. Case studies from Nigeria trace how liberalization has fragmented informal organizational strategies into networks of accumulation and survival that tend to marginalize the interests of the poor within informal enterprise associations. Distinctive political strategies of informal enterprise associations are analyzed to show why dynamic informal organization is unable to break through the barriers of social and legal marginalization that trap the urban poor in cliental forms of political incorporation. This suggests that “social capital” within the informal economy may fail to improve popular political representation and governance outcomes even in contexts of decentralization.

This article examines two policies targeting the informal open-air market and fishing sectors in Jinja, Uganda. The informal sector has grown to become a significant source of livelihood for people in growing cities such as Jinja. At the same time, development policies have become increasingly concerned with encouraging formalization as well as the participation of local stakeholders in governance and decision-making. While there has been much debate about the potential impacts of formalizing previously informal, unregulated, unpermitted activities, the implications of these policies for informal vendors and fishers have received less attention. Despite their promises of addressing previous marginalization, the patterns of participation and formalization enforced by these two policies in Uganda have reduced the control of these individuals over their own livelihoods, as well as intensifying contestations of local authority and jurisdiction over resources.

“Mandingization,” the gradual process of cultural change whereby Jola peoples of the Casamance region of southern Senegal are becoming more like their Mandinka neighbors, is analyzed in this article as comprising four distinguishable processes: ethnogenesis, ethnocultural drift, ethnic osmosis, and ethnic strategizing. By distinguishing among these four processes and analyzing their interaction, we can understand the dynamics of Mandingization more clearly and also derive insights for understanding ethnic change generally. The current moment of ethnic change in The Gambia includes a resurgence in Karon Jola ethnic identity, but we need to view this process as contingent, not yet accomplished, and a challenge to the pattern of Mandinka dominance in a time of broader social change.

Although many scholars have noted the salience of mobility throughout the African continent, there has been little systematic investigation into the link between migration and conflict. Most scholarship has tended to see migration as primarily a by-product of conflict and not as a security issue in its own right. In analyzing and contrasting the different migration–conflict trajectories across two similar case studies—Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana—this article attempts to develop an empirically informed theoretical framework for understanding the nexus between migration and conflict in Africa and to shed light on key intervening variables linking migration processes with violent outcomes.

Over the last decade, African regional organizations have gained considerable scope in peacekeeping and peace enforcement. Two subregional organizations in particular, ECOWAS and SADC, have gathered significant experience in military interventions in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau, Ivory Coast, Lesotho, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. This article assesses the decision-making processes of both organizations ahead of the interventions and concludes that African states participate in military interventions for reasons of national and personal interests rather than humanitarian reasons or out of a primary interest in preserving regional stability. The article draws from extensive fieldwork in four African countries.

This article argues that Ridley Scott's film Black Hawk Down (2001) may be seen with the benefit of historical hindsight as a portrait of the fear of imperial overreach and failure as written through the psyche of elite U.S. soldiers. In Black Hawk Down, Mogadishu and its denizens are made to stand in for the worst fears of the American military and the civilian policymaking establishment: the city, and, by extension, urban Africa, is represented as a feral zone in which the U.S. military's unmatched firepower and technology are overwhelmed in densely populated slums. The Mog, as the film's Special Forces troops call the city, is a ramshackle megacity whose residents are armed to the teeth with the military detritus of the Cold War. Mogadishu thus embodies the new Heart of Darkness, a stateless urban world of vicious Hobbesian war of all against all. This view of Africa as the vanguard of anarchy is shared by a significant segment of the elite in the global North, who see the criminalization of the state in Africa as a direct threat to U.S. interests. If, as these analysts hold, it is from such feral zones that future threats to American society are likely to originate, then potent new weapons systems must be developed to deal with this racialized new world disorder. This article unpacks the ahistorical character of such selfserving representations of urban Africa, underlining the extent to which policies pursued during the Cold War and neoliberal era by powers such as the U.S. have helped to create the conditions that Black Hawk Down represents in such spectacular excess.