You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Examines the new challenges facing Africa's pastoral drylands from large-scale investments and how this might affect the economic and political landscape for the regions affected and their peoples.
Grassroots researchers examine the barriers and ways of implementing the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in Africa.
Pastoralists, ranchers of European descent, conservationists, smallholders, and land investors with political influence converge on the Laikipia plateau in Kenya. Land is claimed by all - the tactics differ. Private property rights are presented, histories of presence are told, charges of immorality are applied, fences are electrified and some resort to violence. The region, marked by enclosures, is left as a tense fragmented frontier. Marie Gravesen embedded herself in the region prior to a wave of land invasions that swept the plateau leading up to Kenya’s 2017 general election. Through a rich telling of the history of Laikipia’s social, political and environmental dynamics, she invites a deeper understanding of the pre-election violence and general tensions as never done before. The manuscript is a revised version of the author's dissertation accepted by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Cologne in 2018.
A key book for conflict and peace studies, reveals the gendered nature of peacebuilding, its consequences, and the importance of women playing a part in peace processes in Africa.Even in the best of circumstances, women are all too often excluded from formal peacemaking and peacebuilding processes and relegated to the sidelines as observers or limited to informal peacebuilding strategies. Yet there is enormous potential in these strategies as women often strive to build bridges across political, ethnic, religious, clan and other differences through alliances arising from common concerns around violence, land, access to resources, and protection of their families and communities, and address ...
Bringing together case studies ranging across the globe, including the US-Mexico borderlands, the Calais encampment in France, refugee camps in Kenya, Uganda and Bangladesh and contested ‘informal’ enclaves and communities in the cities of India, China, Brazil, Nigeria and South Africa, this book challenges current ways of thinking about the governance of human settling, mobility and placemaking. Together, the 15 essays question the validity of the conventional hegemonic divisions of Global North vs. Global South and ‘formal’ vs. ‘informal’, in terms of geographic presence, transborder performances and the ideological inter-dependence of Northern and Southern spaces, spatial prac...
This interdisciplinary volume provides a comprehensive and rich analysis of the century-long socio-ecological transformation of Lake Naivasha, Kenya. Major globalised processes of agricultural intensification, biodiversity conservation efforts, and natural-resource extraction have simultaneously manifested themselves in this one location. These processes have roots in the colonial period and have intensified in the past decades, after the establishment of the cut-flower industry and the geothermal-energy industry. The chapters in this volume exemplify the multiple, intertwined socio-environmental crises that consequently have played out in Naivasha in the past and the present, and that continue to shape its future.
Once again, the Horn of Africa has been in the headlines. And once again the news has been bad: drought, famine, conflict, hunger, suffering and death. The finger of blame has been pointed in numerous directions: to the changing climate, to environmental degradation, to overpopulation, to geopolitics and conflict, to aid agency failures, and more. But it is not all disaster and catastrophe. Many successful development efforts at ‘the margins’ often remain hidden, informal, sometimes illegal; and rarely in line with standard development prescriptions. If we shift our gaze from the capital cities to the regional centres and their hinterlands, then a very different perspective emerges. Thes...
Interrogates the narratives of land grabbing and agricultural investment through detailed local studies that illuminate how these are experienced on the ground and the implications for Africa's land and agricultural economy.
Examines the silicosis crisis in the South African mining industry, and reveals how the rate of, often fatal, tuberculosis among black migrant miners was hidden for over a century. South Africa's gold mines are the largest and historically among the most profitable in the world. Yet at what human cost? This book reveals how the mining industry, abetted by a minority state, hid a pandemic of silicosis for almost a century and allowed miners infected with tuberculosis to spread disease to rural communities in South Africa and to labour-sending states. In the twentieth century, South African mines twice faced a crisis over silicosis, which put its workers at risk of contracting pulmonary tuberc...
The experience of many South Asian and Latin American countries demonstrates that the power of local NGOs can contribute to improving the quality of development services throughout the developing world. Are local NGOs in Africa able to wield power in development? Local NGOs in Africa are lagging behind their counterparts in South Asia and Latin America in terms of developing power. How can African NGOs remedy their absence of power? Local NGOs will have to create their own development space, achieve a degree of financial independence from donors, build solid links to the international development community and have a willingness to engage with the political aspects of development work. Why should donors and international NGOs promote local NGO power? Local NGO power aids NGO sustainability, a common goal of donors, NGOs and beneficiary communities alike. North America: Indiana U Press