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What is happening in Islam is of concern to more than Muslims. The Qur’an is the prime possession of Muslims: how then, are they reading and understanding their sacred Book today? This volume, originally published in 1985, examines eight writers from India, Egypt, Iran and Senegal. Their way with the Qur’an indicates how some in Islam respond to the pressures in life and thought, associated in the West with thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Marx, Camus, Kafka, Jung, Fanon and De Chardin.
Africa: The Politics of Independence and Unity combines into one edition for the first time Africa: The Politics of Independence and Africa: The Politics of Unity. With a new introduction by the author, this edition provides some of the earliest and most valuable analysis of African politics during the period when the colonial system began to disintegrate. ø The influential Africa: The Politics of Independence was written as Africa was just realizing independence and still reveling in the optimism it brought. Immanuel Wallerstein was one of the few scholars who had traveled throughout Africa during the collapse of colonial rule. As a result, his interpretive essay captures the dynamism of that period of transformation and adroitly analyzes Africa?s modern political developments during the nascent process of decolonization. Africa: The Politics of Unity, published six years later, examines the African unity movement that arose between 1957 and 1965 and its revolutionary core. It is often considered the first thorough analysis of the postindependence history of Africa.
The essays in this book shed interdisciplinary and multicultural light on a hypothesis that helps to account for such an unexpected convergence of enlightenment and religion in our times: Religion has reentered the public sphere because it puts into question the relation between God and the concept of political sovereignty.
Black Africa presents political, economic and social data for 41 black African nations. The first edition was published in 1972 and included only data on 32 countries - which was the total number of independent African nations at that time. Enlarging on the first edition, this second edition covers in detail important aspects of the countries included, from demography to political development and social mobilization to a modern comparative analysis of African states. Black Africa is a complete and comprehensive handbook. The first edition of Black Africa won a Book of the Year Award from the American Library Association.
This paper is addressed to a broad audience of development professionals who are interested in both the substance of decentralisation issues and their impact on economic development. The paper summarises experience with alternative decentralisation arrangements and suggests a new analytical framework for assessing the impact of such arrangements on the performance of economic development programmes and projects. Consideration of alternative forms of decentralisation reveals the need to clarify and establish priorities among economic and political objectives. The potential for conflict among multiple objectives and the need to assess decentralisation policies in terms of acceptable trade-offs among those objectives summarises the importance of this paper.
This is the first academic study of the impact of semi-presidentialism in emerging democracies outside of Europe. Semi-presidentialism is where there is both a directly-elected fixed-term president and a prime minister who is responsible to the legislature. For the most part, semi-presidentialism is seen as being a risky choice for new democracies because it can create potentially destabilizing competition between the president and prime minister. And yet, there are now more than fifty semi-presidential countries in the world. Moreover, many of these countries are in Africa, the former Soviet Union and Asia, often in places where democracy has yet to establish a firm foundation. This study b...
Originally published in 2003, this book addresses the rarely explored subject of the reciprocal relationships between nationalism, nation and state-building, and economic change. Analysis of the economic element in the building of nations and states cannot be confined to Europe, and therefore these diverse yet interlinked case-studies cover all continents. Authors come to contrasting conclusions, some regarding the economic factor as central, while others show that nation-states came into being before the constitution of a national market. The essays leave no doubt that the nation-state is an historical phenonemon and as such is liable to 'expiry' both through the process of globalisation and through the development of a 'cyber-society' which evades state control. By contrast, developments in southeastern Europe, the former USSR, and parts of Africa and the Far East show that building the nation-state has not run its course.