Culture,integration and African Renaissance

ABSTRACT

This article examines the role of language in negotiating power between Sudanese Arabists and Sudanese Africanists from a critical discourse analysis perspective (henceforth CDA). The aim is to demonstrate how extreme political discourse can jeopardise national unity. The article begins by summarising the basic tenets of the CDA theory and proceeds to examine Sudanese power-related discourse. Particularly, the article assumes both top-down and bottom-up approaches to analyse the discourses corresponding to the two groups, Sudanese Arabists and Sudanese Africanists. The top-down approach examines the discourse of the ruling Arab elites who have exclusive access to institutional discourse and communication. By contrast, although the Sudanese Africanist discourse was once considered illegal and could not be conveyed through public channels, in more modern times it has found the Internet, television and radio (among others) as avenues for dissemination. A number of socio-political groups, generally referred to as marginalised affiliations, are now initiating resistance discourse (henceforth RD) which goes hand in hand with their armed struggle against the ruling elites.     

African tourist art as tradition and product of the postcolonial exotic

ABSTRACT

Figurative art made in Central and West Africa for the global market is a form of tourist art – a category that has been plagued in art historical research by misconstrued concepts such as the authenticity of traditional/precolonial art. Following its categorisation as a commodity, studies focused on the decontextualisation of the object, thus marginalising the producing culture. In this article I investigate the role of the artist in preserving tradition and the role of the trader who, as cultural broker, exoticises the object. Since it can be argued that these are acts of decolonising, African tourist art can be regarded as a product of the postcolonial exotic, as defned by Graham Huggan (2001). Accepting the inescapability of postcoloniality, tourist art can be repositioned as a successful attempt to preserve and promote African cultural traditions and identity in the new era.     

Public Finance and Capital Investment: A National Perspective on Colonial Dahomey

How, when and to whom should a woman marry, what constitutes marriage and what rights has a woman to influence the selection of her spouse? These and other questions were subjects of intense contestation between young men and women and their parents, on one hand, and, on the other, between commoners and members of the traditional elite in the Western Igbo district of Igbuzo in Southern Nigeria during the early twentieth century. Disputes over marriage rites centred on the politics of isinmo or the shaving of a woman's head. Isinmo gave the “barber” exclusive and inalienable rights to the woman. Yet, in what amounted to reversal of tradition, women seeking to end or reduce parental and patriarchal control appropriated some the rituals of isinmo to contest its use and efficacy in the hands of its erstwhile beneficiaries.     

Fighting for the rule of law: civil resistance and the lawyers' movement in Pakistan

Pakistan, sometimes referred to as ‘the most dangerous place on earth’, is not typically thought of as a place where popular nonviolent resistance could take root, much less succeed. Citizen apathy, poor governance, and fear of regime repression and terrorist violence are barriers to effective civic activism inside Pakistan. Yet, over the past two years, Pakistan's authoritarian ruler was ousted and its independent judiciary restored following a massive grassroots campaign led by lawyers. The ‘men in black’, whose insistence on the rule of law and embrace of nonviolent struggle captured the hearts and minds of millions of Pakistanis, helped transform the country's political landscape in unexpected ways. The successes tallied by this nonviolent movement, this article will argue, can be attributed to the large-scale non-cooperation and civil disobedience that pressured two successive Pakistani regimes – one authoritarian and one democratic – to yield to its demands. Unity and mass participation, nonviolent discipline, and the creative use of nonviolent tactics were three key ingredients of success. While instability and Islamist extremism continue to plague Pakistan, the lawyers' movement highlights the steadily growing strength of Pakistani civil society have a potential to influence democratic change in the country.     

DEVELOPMENT ON MY TERMS: DEVELOPMENT CONSULTANTS AND KNOWLEDGE FOR DEVELOPMENT

Consultants are an integral component of development aid. Their involvement is based on an assumption of the transferability of knowledge to clients and beneficiaries. However, this role, its efficacy and the concept of knowledge transfer have all been questioned. Although research has shown interest in northern development consultants in recent years, detailed processes and practices of southern consultants' engagement with knowledge production are less analysed. Drawing on debates about knowledge, power and managing development interventions and on extensive fieldwork exploring a Bolivian consultancy company's assignments for northern development agencies, we analyse the ‘knowledge engagements’ between clients, consultants and beneficiaries. The results suggest a novel theorisation: knowledge engagements are shaped by power relations exercised through discourses and financial aid on one hand and shared and unshared lifeworlds and backgrounds of actors on the other. They are also characterised by collusive behaviour with the discourses and practices of aid on the part of consultants and beneficiaries, which in turn influences outcomes. Southern consultants, although aware of these issues, are in a difficult position to challenge these relationships. A greater recognition of the tensions could lead to a new role for consultants if collective action were to renegotiate their terms of engagement and aim for a new mutuality. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Immigrant protest: an introduction

The last decade has witnessed an explosion of ‘immigrant protests’, political mobilizations by irregular migrants and pro-migrant activists. This special issue on ‘immigrant protest’ has emerged in response to this rise in the visibility of immigrant protests, and its central aim is to contribute to the growing body of scholarship on migrant resistance movements and to consider the implications of these struggles for critical understandings of citizenship. This introduction maps out some of the central issues and themes emerging from the contributions to this issue, exploring the tensions between integrationist and autonomous approaches and theories of migrant activism and resistance and between migrant and activist strategies of invisibility and visibility. By bringing immigrant protests to the heart of debates about citizenship, we hope to further extend discussions about the limits and the possibilities of citizenship as the material and conceptual horizon of critical social analysis and political participation and practice today.     

Naked protest: the maternal politics of citizenship and revolt

This article explores immigrant protest, citizenship and their relationship, through an account of a ‘naked protest’ by a group of mothers, refused asylum seekers and ‘illegal immigrants’ at Yarl's Wood immigration removal centre in England and ends with an account of the use of the ‘naked curse’ in a protest by an indigenous group of mothers against global oil corporations in the Niger Delta. Woven together from activist materials, news reports, interviews, documentaries and historical data, I recount and mobilise these protests to think about ‘the scaling of bodies’ (Marion-Young 1990) and citizenship under neoliberalism, and the routes through which motherhood is mobilised as a site of political agency and resistance to processes of disenfranchisement. I argue that these maternal protests challenge the ‘catastrophic functionalism’ of Agamben-inspired accounts of ‘bare life’, and offer an alternative lens through which to perceive the ethical and political claims made by abject populations (Papadopoulos et al. 2008, p. 198). In thinking through and with these naked protests, this article reframes the sexual politics of citizenship and brings questions of maternity and natality to bear on citizenship studies.     

A Longue Durée Approach to the Role of Civil Society in the Uprisings against Authoritarianism in the Arab world

Abstract

This article will show how a ‘new history’, inspired from longue durée approaches, can be methodologically applied, and how it equips us with analytical tools that improve our capacity to understand the long-term changes that fostered the civil society-based resistance in the Arab world. Although we cannot predict the exact timing of such resistance efforts, the application of the longue durée method provides us with tools that help us understand why and how the many uprisings transpired. This complements, and partly contrasts with, most previous research, which had its main focus on discussion of short-term factors that were claimed to have caused the Arab mass-mobilized resistance in 2010–2011. The article draws upon and intends to contribute to the theoretical debate on contentious politics within social movement research, resistance studies, and civil society-driven democratization research.     

Citizen's adoption intention toward contact tracing apps: An analysis using innovation resistance theory

This study explores the factors that prevent citizens from using contact tracing apps (CTA). It uses the innovation resistance theory to construct a parsimonious data analysis model. Data are collected from 440 users of CTA, and an analysis using structural equation modeling is done. Moderation analysis is performed to measure the influence of trust on the relationship between independent and dependent variables. The results reveal that privacy concerns, functional complexity, and benefit ambiguity are the main factors causing hindrance in the adoption of CTAs. The study carries implications for public authorities and technology professionals for promoting and increasing the uptake of public-oriented mass-consumption technology.     

RESISTING CRIME: THE EFFECTS OF VICTIM ACTION ON THE OUTCOMES OF CRIMES

This study assessed the impact of sixteen types of victim self protection (SP) actions on three types of outcomes of criminal incidents: first, whether the incident resulted in property loss, second, whether it resulted in injury to the victim, and, third, whether it resulted in serious injury. Data on 27, 595 personal contact crime incidents recorded in the National Crime Victimization Survey for the 1992 to 2001 decade were used to estimate multivariate models of crime outcomes with logistic regression. Results indicated that self-protection in general, both forceful and nonforceful, reduced the likelihood of property loss and injury, compared to nonresistance. A variety of mostly forceful tactics, including resistance with a gun, appeared to have the strongest effects in reducing the risk of injury, though some of the findings were unstable due to the small numbers of sample cases. The appearance, in past research, of resistance contributing to injury was found to be largely attributable to confusion concerning the sequence of SP actions and injury. In crimes where both occurred, injury followed SP in only 10 percent of the incidents. Combined with the fact that injuries following resistance are almost always relatively minor, victim resistance appears to be generally a wise course of action.