African Politics

When the sun rises each morning we may say the reason is that the earth on its elliptical orbit spins so that one point faces that star. Or we may say that the Sun God has mounted his chariot. Or we may say, after Ptolemy and the Christian elders until a few centuries ago, that the sun is moving around the earth. Take your pick. They have all seemed good reasons from reasonable men in their time. Our acceptance of what passes for reasoned argument has a great deal to do with the company we keep. Perhaps for most people, the word of accepted authority is the ultimate parameter on where those reasoned arguments may venture.

This paper presents the theoretical background and questions for a CGHR research study on the transformative impact that ICTs such as mobile phones on governance in Africa. The first section integrates critical insights from the literature on ICT for Development and on governance in Africa to outline and clarify the main objects of analysis. Section two introduces and justifies the Human Development and Capability Approach (HDCA) as the primary analytical framework guiding the research methodology.

The African Politics and International Relations series seeks to provide readers with a conceptual and comparative perspective on transformations associated with the rise of Africa in international relations and within the global economy. The series explores the empirical and theoretical implications of the engagement of both old and new players, the redefinition of the continent's politics, socio-economic transitions and changing patterns of region-building, both within Africa and with the global South. The series, through its focus on the reappraisal of the role and conception of African agency, seeks to provide readers with a comprehensive, accessible, and insightful treatment of issues that challenge conventional understandings and representations of Africa.

Although the US and its Western allies had long relationship with Africa in various categories of aid and development, China’s recent entry into the Dark Continent caused huge displeasure to the traditional donors. The Asian giant’s economic investment in Africa was so huge that it engaged scholars to analyze the trend from various perspectives including politics, economics, commerce, governance, human rights as well as security. The move also became an awakening or a reawakening for the US and its think tank in that, with the magnitude of rich resources under its soil, Africa is to be redefined in a more appealing fashion very unlike the Dark Continent the West had misinterpreted it for calculated hidden interests. It is based on this background that this study problematises the nature of the competition between the two giants and the implications it may hold for Africa.   

While elements of symbolism, culture, and identity have been explored in relation to the urban, domestic, and architectural transformations of the Casbah before and during the Algerian Revolution, such accounts typically allude to but stop short of a thorough analysis of the primarily political modalities of governance and resistance within such colonial spaces. To corroborate and reframe these urban studies, this essay offers a typology for a ‘colonial politics of space,’ aided by Djaffar Lesbet’s notion of counter-spaces and by various displaced Foucauldian themes. Next, I offer a critical appraisal of the FLN’s spatial governance as it emerged out of the Casbah, and as distinct from French colonial spatial governmentality. This critical evaluation of FLN spatial governance, I argue, provides clues for resistance to contemporary, neocolonial spatial domination.

Senegal and The Gambia represent two different cases of democratic transition in Africa. While Senegalese vibrant civil society and electorate successfully secured electoral victory over the ruling party in both presidential and parliamentary elections, the Gambia case presented a totally different parallel, with the authoritarian incumbent leader consolidating his grip and clamping on the opposition to ensure electoral victory in an election widely duped as not free and fair. The paper provides theoretical and practical analysis of the variations in civil society, electoral mobilization, political landscape and nature of government as major factors driving outcome of the elections in the two sister states.