Feature reviews

Africa: prospects of a rebirth?

The Politics of Africa's Economic Recovery. by Richard Sandbrook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993

Hemmed In: Responses to Africa's Economic Decline. edited by Thomas M Callaghy” &; John Ravenhill New York: Columbia University Press, 1994

Policy Reform for Sustainable Development in Africa: The Institutional Imperative. edited by Louis A Picard &; Michele Garrity Boulder, Co: Lynne Rienner, 1994

Social Change and Economic Reform in Africa. edited by Peter Gibbon. Uppsala: The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1993

A Blighted Harvest: The World Bank and African Agriculture in the 1980s. by Peter Gibbon, Kjell J Havnevik and Kenneth Hermele London: James Currey; Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1993

Unmasking Makiya: Iraq and Arab intellectuals

Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World. by Kanan Makiya. London: Jonathan Cape, 1993 pp 367, £18.99

New developments in development thinking

Beyond the Impasse: new directions in development theory. by Frans J Schuurman (ed). London: Zed Press, 1993, ppix + 233, £13.95 pbk, £32.95 hbk

Changing Paradigms in Development—South, East and West; a meeting of minds in Africa. by Margareta von Troil (ed). Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1993, pp 200, £9.95     

Migrations of Manuscripts 2009

The history of capital punishment in post-Independence Ireland has received scant scholarly attention. This essay is an attempt to set out what can be learned about the executed persons, the executioners, and the politicians whose inaction (not reforming the law) and actions (deciding against clemency) brought the two former groups together. The death penalty was deployed strategically against IRA members during the early 1940s as part of a package of legal measures designed to crush subversive activity, but more usually its targets were murderers whose acts had no wider ramifications. One notable aspect of the Irish arrangements was that when a prisoner was to be taken to the gallows an English hangman was always contracted to arrange the ‘drop’. Reflecting popular antipathy towards the practice the Irish state was unable to find a willing executioner within its borders.