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.
This book provides the first comprehensive overview of Africa's history of democracy, grappling with important questions facing Africa today.
An engrossing analysis of the pseudo-democratic methods employed by despots around the world to retain control Contrary to what is commonly believed, authoritarian leaders who agree to hold elections are generally able to remain in power longer than autocrats who refuse to allow the populace to vote. In this engaging and provocative book, Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas expose the limitations of national elections as a means of promoting democratization, and reveal the six essential strategies that dictators use to undermine the electoral process in order to guarantee victory for themselves. Based on their firsthand experiences as election watchers and their hundreds of interviews with presidents, prime ministers, diplomats, election officials, and conspirators, Cheeseman and Klaas document instances of election rigging from Argentina to Zimbabwe, including notable examples from Brazil, India, Nigeria, Russia, and the United States—touching on the 2016 election. This eye-opening study offers a sobering overview of corrupted professional politics, while providing fertile intellectual ground for the development of new solutions for protecting democracy from authoritarian subversion.
Providing a comprehensive and cutting edge examination of this important continent, Routledge Handbook of African Politics surveys the key debates and controversies, dealing with each of the major issues to be found in Africa’s politics today. Structured into 6 broad areas, the handbook features over 30 contributions focused around: The State Identity Conflict Democracy and Electoral Politics Political Economy & Development International Relations Each chapter deals with a specific topic, providing an overview of the main arguments and theories and explaining the empirical evidence that they are based on, drawing on high-profile cases such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Nigeria, Somalia, South Africa, Rwanda and Zimbabwe. The Handbook also contains new contributions on a wide range of topical issues, including terrorism, the growing influence of China, civil war, and transitional justice, making it required reading for non-specialists and experts alike. Featuring both established scholars and emerging researchers, this is a vital resource for all students of African Studies, democratization, conflict resolution and Third World politics.
A radical new approach to understanding Africa's elections: explaining why politicians, bureaucrats and voters so frequently break electoral rules.
Offers new research on the vital importance of institutions, such as presidential term-limits in the African democratisation processes.
The Oxford Handbook of Kenyan Politics provides a comprehensive and comparative overview of the Kenyan political system as well as an insightful account of Kenyan history from 1930 to the present day.
"A higher education history textbook on the history of authoritarianism in Africa"--
With over 400 A-Z entries, this new dictionary provides clear and authoritative definitions of terms within the fast-growing field of African Politics. It includes coverage on elections, parties and judiciaries, but also popular protest, gender-relations, the politics of development, and Africa's international relations. Entries comprise of major events and figures within African Politics, including the East African Community and independance, as well as covering key terms of particular relevance to Africa such as neopatrimonialism, queue voting, and post-conflict power sharing. Written by a world-leading political scientist working on the area of African politics, this dictionary is an essential guide for both undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as academics, journalists, and researchers working on African politics alike.
This book provides the first cross-regional study of an increasingly important form of politics: coalitional presidentialism. Drawing on original research of minority presidents in the democratising and hybrid regimes of Armenia, Benin, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Kenya, Malawi, Russia, and Ukraine, it seeks to understand how presidents who lack single party legislative majorities build and manage cross-party support in legislative assemblies. It develops a framework for analysing this phenomenon, and blends data from MP surveys, detailed case studies, and wider legislative and political contexts, to analyse systematically the tools that presidents deploy to manage their coalitions. The authors ...
This book provides an overview of the troubled process of nation-building in post-colonial Kenya. Despite the distinctive features of the Moi and Kenyatta regimes, contributors make the case that since the late colonial period continuity, and not change, has been the dominant theme in Kenyan political life. Through a range of methodological lenses and empirical material, the chapters highlight different aspects of this continuity: the strength of the provincial administration, the weakness of formal party structures, the central role of ethnicity in shaping political competition, the understanding of the state as a resource in itself, and the ultimately incompatible beliefs held by different communities regarding how power can be legitimately exercised. Taken together, the persistence of these factors over time helps to explain the failure of the nation-building project in Kenya, and the context within which disputed elections in late-2007 could lead to the collapse of political order and the deaths of over 1,000 Kenyans.