295 research outputs found
Landing the middle peasantry: Narodism in Tanzania
African Studies Center Working Paper No. 2
The agrarian question in Tanzania: the case of tobacco
African Studies Center Working Paper No. 32Since independence in 1961, Tanzania has pursued a policy of institutionalizing
a middle peasantry, while stymieing the development of capitalism's principal classes. The policy has taken an extreme form following a 1973
decision to forcibly reorganize the majority of Tanzania's peasants on individual
block farms within nucleated villages and to bring the sphere of production
more directly under the control of the state and international finance
capital. This attempt to subordinate peasant labor to capital by perpetuating
middle peasant households increasingly confines capital to its most primitive
state. The pursuit of this policy in an export-oriented agricultural economy
has particular contradictions and limitations. As long as labor and capital
are not separated, they cannot be combined in their technically most advanced
form. Hence the contradiction of the state's attempts to extract greater
surplus value while simultaneously acting to expand and preserve middle peasant
households. This paper explores the implications of such a course of
action within the framework of Marxist writings on the agrarian question.
Using tobacco production as, an example, it discusses the ways in which middle
peasant households are being squeezed and pauperized by this backward capitalist
system. It argues that the system inhibits the formal and real subordination
of labor to capital and tends to perpetuate the extraction of absolute
as opposed to relative surplus value. Household production fetters the
concentration of capital and prevents the socialization of labor, while perpetuating
the hoe as the main instrument of production
Government and opposition in Kenya, 1966-1969
African Studies Center Working Paper No. 85INTRODUCTION:
Little exists to document the widespread repression of opposition in
Africa since independence. Current studies of the rise of capitalism and the
post-colonial state largely ignore institutionalized authoritarianism, which
characterizes the political side of this process. The paper below discusses
the repression of opposition in Kenya up to 1972. Its salience continues with
Kenya having become a de jure one party state under President Daniel arap Moi
and the increasingly repressive atmosphere since the abortive coup of 1982. It
now appears that authoritarianism must be regarded as part of the ongoing
political process and not simply as episodic. [TRUNCATED
The historical origins of Tanzania's working class
African Studies Center Working Paper No. 35INTRODUCTION: This paper discusses the historical conditions which prevented the
emergence of a strong capitalist ruling class along the Kenyan lines in
Tanzania. In Kenya, a nascent big bourgeoisie controlled African political
associations as early as the 1930s, while in Tanzania, teachers, traders, and
clerks were the mainstay of the independence movement, with kulak farmers
participating (Awiti, 1972; Bienen, 1969; Hyden, 1968; Maguire, 1969), but
never predominating as a class "to the extent where they could become an
important political force at the national level" (Shivji, 1976: 50). A
productive class of capitalists thereby came to engineer the state in
independent Kenya, while in Tanzania the dominant force rested with an
unproductive "bureaucratic bourgeoisie," a class awkwardly termed and poorly
understood. The result in the case of Kenya was a capitalism which matured
along rather classic lines, that is by increasing the productivity of labor
without resulting in absolute immiseration, whereas in Tanzania, capitalism
was retarded along the lines suggested by the Narodniks with the
predictable consequences of absolute pauperization described by Lenin. [TRUNCATED
The devolution paradigm: theoretical critiques and the case of Kenya
Devolution’s assumptions presume democracy, yet its proponents view it as an antidote to
repressive centralized states, where its assumptions do not hold. This contradiction explains why
devolution mostly reproduces the status quo rather than transforming it in transition political economies.
Scholars have both supported and criticized devolution, while numerous donors, civil society activists,
local politicians, and ordinary citizens still view it as a solution. Disaggregating the theoretical
assumptions underpinning the devolution paradigm and juxtaposing them against a case study of Kenya
demonstrates how old incentives undermine new formal legal changes and why institutional change may
be a dependent rather than an independent variable. Thus, a range of institutional initiatives from
organizational tinkering to devolution and constitutional engineering often fail in autocracies and nominal
democracies
Rural Development, Environmental Sustainability, and Poverty Alleviation: A Critique of Current Paradigms
Donors have developed new micro-level and local paradigms to address rural development, environmental sustainability, and poverty alleviation to bypass, ignore, and substitute for badly functioning and corrupt states. Yet, states still set the macro-economic, legal, and policy parameters or “rules of the game” within which other entities operate, and many non-state actors are only nominally independent. Hence, technical initiatives stemming from these paradigms, aimed at growth and equity are often theoretically misconceived and tend to fail when implemented. The paper critically discusses the new paradigms, including decentralization, civil society, microentrepreneurship, and capacity building, among others, mainly using African examples.economic development, formal and informal and insitutional arrangements, development planning and policy, economic development, regional urban and rural analyses, formal and informal sectors, institutional arrangements, institutional linkages to development.
The Politics of Violence in Kenya
African Studies Center Working Paper No. 257INTRODUCTION
"So this is how it begins" (a Kenyan political scientist, Nairobi, January 2008).
To the outside world, Kenya in 2007 was a model of stability and future possibilities. The
draconian repression experienced under President Moi in the 1980s and 1990s finally had
ended. It was replaced with hard-fought-for freedoms of speech, the press, and association.
They emerged towards the end of Moi's rule and were expanded after President Kibaki's
election in 2002. The days of imprisonment, detention without trial, and torture of opposition
party supporters were gone. Kenya's once vibrant economy had been decimated and brought
to its knees by Moi. However, by 2007, just five years after installing a new government,
Kenya had an annual growth rate of over 6% and was poised to do even better. The mood
was optimistic and most thought Kenya was back on an economic roll. Some in government
spoke of Kenya following East Asia's "tigers," and becoming another Newly Industrialized
Country (NIC). This was just one side of the story.
The other was captured by Kenya's low scores on the World Bank's Governance
Indicators, placing it below the mean for Sub-Saharan Africa in three of the following four
areas: government effectiveness (28%/28%), political stability (15%/35.6%), control of
corruption (16%/30%), and the rule of law (15.7%/28.8%). 1 Kenya was still rocked by
financial scandals at the top of government, its infrastructure continued to crumble, and
foreign companies were still skittish about investing in the country. 2 Crime, including
gunfights in the central business district of Nairobi, carjacking, holdups in houses, and
gangland style murders, peppered the lives of ordinary Kenyans and others. This duality of
both positive transformation and imminent decay aptly characterized Kenya in the post-Moi
era.[TRUNCATED
Dying to win: elections, political violence, and institutional decay in Kenya
African Studies Center Working Paper No. 263Introduction
This paper examines the lessons learned from Kenya's 2007 post election violence and what
has happened since then. It notes that the root causes of the violence still persist, have not
been addressed, and easily could be reignited. Faced with a situation where institutions and
the rule of law have been weakened deliberately and where diffused violence is widespread,
both Kenya's transition to democracy and the fate of the nation remain vulnerable. The
argument here is that the problems faced in holding and managing elections in conflict
situations often are not simply technical. Instead, in Kenya and elsewhere, many difficulties
are symptomatic of larger political and institutional questions related to democratic change
that are more difficult to analyze in causal terms or to address.
Democratic theorists from Robert Dahl2 onward have long understood that
democracy consists of much more than just multi-party elections. At the heart of the
democratic experiment are two underlying caveats bordering on truisms. First, there must be
a willingness to lose elections and not to win them by any means and at all costs, including
killing one's opponents. In established democracies, both politicians and the public accept
that tomorrow is another day to get their person elected. Second, and central to democracy
and the democratic process, is a belief in the integrity of the rule of law and institutions that
must be matched by the way in which laws and institutions operate in practice. Where this
does not occur, democracy is vulnerable. However, there is little by way of agreement about
the underlying causes or events that give rise to these two factors or trigger the incentives for
elite consensus necessary for their emergence. [TRUNCATED
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Brainstem atrophy in focal epilepsy destabilizes brainstem-brain interactions: Preliminary findings.
BACKGROUND: MR Imaging has shown atrophy in brainstem regions that were linked to autonomic dysfunction in epilepsy patients. The brainstem projects to and modulates the activation state of several wide-spread cortical/subcortical regions. The goal was to investigate 1. Impact of brainstem atrophy on gray matter connectivity of cortical/subcortical structures and autonomic control. 2. Impact on the modulation of cortical/subcortical functional connectivity.
METHODS: 11 controls and 18 patients with non-lesional focal epilepsy (FE) underwent heart rate variability (HRV) measurements and a 3 T MRI (T1 in all subjects, task-free fMRI in 7 controls/ 12 FE). The brainstem was extracted, and atrophy assessed using deformation-based-morphometry. The age-corrected z-scores of the mean Jacobian determinants were extracted from 71 5x5x5 mm grids placed in brainstem regions associated with autonomic function. Cortical and non-brainstem subcortical gray matter atrophy was assessed with voxel-based-morphometry and mean age corrected z-scores of the modulated gray matter volumes extracted from 380 cortical/subcortical rois. The profile similarity index was used to characterize the impact of brainstem atrophy on gray matter connectivity. The fMRI was preprocessed in SPM12/Conn17 and the BOLD signal extracted from 398 ROIs (16 brainstem). A dynamic task-free analysis approach was used to identify activation states. Connectivity HRV relationship were assessed with Spearman rank correlations.
RESULTS: HRV was negatively correlated with reduced brainstem right hippocampus/parahippocampus gray matter connectivity in controls (p \u3c .05, FDR) and reduced brainstem to right parietal cortex, lingual gyrus, left hippocampus/amygdala, parahippocampus, temporal pole, and bilateral anterior thalamus connectivity in FE (p \u3c .05, FDR). Dynamic task-free fMRI analysis identified 22 states. The strength of the functional brainstem/cortical connectivity of state 15 was negatively associated with HRV (r = -0.5, p = .03) and positively with decreased brainstem-cortical (0.49, p = .03) gray matter connectivity.
CONCLUSION: The findings of this small pilot study suggest that impaired brainstem-cortex gray matter connectivity in FE negatively affects the brainstem\u27s ability to control cortical activation
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