What/who is still missing in International Relations scholarship? Situating Africa as an agent in IR theorising

This paper engages with non-Western, specifically African, scholarship and insight with the goal of highlighting the importance of African contributions to IR theorising. We highlight the Western dominance in IR theorising and examine the inadequacy of the major analytical constructs provided by established IR theory in capturing and explaining shifting reality in Africa. We argue that African insights, experience and ideas present a challenge to dominant IR constructs and knowledge within the international system, and that these insights, when taken seriously, would enrich our understanding of IR. We show this by problematising some central (often taken-for-granted) IR concepts such as the state, liberalism and individualism and underscore the need to reconstruct more encompassing ‘stories’ and images to innovate, revise and potentially replace some of the conventional ‘stories’ that have been told in IR.     

Books in review

He is the author of Importing Foreign Workers: A Comparison of German and American Policy.     

Heterogenous demand for public goods: Behavior in the voluntary contributions mechanism

Numerous laboratory experiments have investigated the performance of several processes for providing public goods through voluntary contributions. This research has been able to identify features of the institution or environment which are reliably likely to produce outcomes “close” to the free riding outcome or “substantially” greater than the pessimistic prediction of standard models. One such feature is the “marginal per-capita return” (MPCR) from the public good. Various authors have altered MPCR between groups or for an entire group at the same time. The experiments reported here address a different question, “What would happen if, within a group, some persons faced a ‘high’ MPCR while others faced a ‘low’ MPCR?”     

Patterns of Young Adult Social Roles Transitions Across 24 Months and Subsequent Substance Use and Mental Health

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Young adults experience social role transitions across multiple life domains, and a deeper understanding of the ways in which these simultaneous transition...     

The ‘poisoned chalice’ of state ownership of water infrastructure in contemporary Blantyre,Malawi

The remunicipalisation of water in the global south has heightened a sense of optimism among left-leaning scholars and activists. This is widely heralded as a triumph over neo-liberal privatisation and therefore seen as putting water back into public hands. This article takes a critical view of this trend. It contends that insofar as remunicipalisation is conflated with state ownership, it may in other contexts not necessarily lead to water going back into public hands. An empirical account is presented of how state ownership in Malawi has been imbricated in commercialisation rationalities that have in turn undermined the establishment of an egalitarian public water network in Blantyre City. The article uncovers the extent to which the dominance of private capitalist interests in Malawi’s economy, lack of public financing and over-reliance on debt from global-local financial markets have systemically compromised the efficacy of the state in mediating the politics of water production and distribution.