Juxtafications of the Future:: Growth-speak and its Shadow Sides in Africa

Repräsentationen des afrikanischen Kontinents behandeln ihn zunehmend als „Zukunftskontinent“, der einen klaren wirtschaftlichen und gesellschaftlichen Aufschwung vor sich habe. Diese Welle des Optimismus folgt einer vorausgegangenen Welle des Afropessimismus. Der Aufsatz fragt, wessen Ideen und Interessen sich in solchen Diskursen niederschlagen, warum sie gerade heute so virulent werden und wessen Interessen sie dienen. Die Wachstumsrhetorik, so wird deutlich, rechtfertigt die gleichen externen Interventionen, Investitionen und Extraktionen wie die vorausgegangenen Wellen der Rhetorik. Kritische afrikanische Stimmen weisen auf die Widersprüche und Sinnentleertheit der neuen Hyperrhetorik hin und bieten damit alternative, komplexere und historisch klarer verankerte Entwürfe der zukünftigen Einbindung des Kontinents in das globale Wirtschaftsgefüge

Why African Studies Matters

Intet resum

Certifications of citizenship: the history, politics and materiality of identity documents in South Asian states and diasporas

Experiences in the post-partition Indian subcontinent refute the conventional expectation that the 'possession of citizenship enables the acquisition of documents certifying it' (Jayal, 2013, 71). Instead, identity papers of various types play a vital part in certifying and authenticating claims to citizenship. This is particularly important in a context where the history of state formation, continuous migration flows and the rise of right-wing majoritarian politics has created an uncertain situation for individuals deemed to be on the ‘margins’ of the state. The papers that constitute this special issue bring together a range of disciplinary perspectives in order to investigate the history, politics and materiality of identity documents, and to dismantle citizenship as an absolute and fixed notion, seeking instead to theorise the very mutable ‘hierarchies’ and ‘degrees’ of citizenship. Collectively they offer a valuable lens onto how migrants, refugees and socio-economically marginal individuals negotiate their relationship with the state, both within South Asia and in South Asian diaspora communities. This introduction examines the wider context of the complex intersections between state-issued identity documents and the nature of citizenship and draws out cross-cutting themes across the papers in this collection

Disrupting democracy? Altering landscapes of local government in post-2000 Zimbabwe

This paper focuses on the changing landscape of rural local government since the start of Zimbabwe’s current political and economic crisis in 2000. The paper questions the liberaldemocratic assumption that casts the period ‘before the crisis’ as some kind of mythical Eden of normal government and well-functioning democracy. At the same time, it recognises that the scale, terms and intensity of the post-2000 disruptions denote a dramatic era of altering politics and practices of government that require close attention. It further argues that local government is not just a front for national processes of state making and rule. Rather, it has its own localised sets of conditions and dynamics which, when articulating with national projects of power, production and accumulation, necessarily produce diverse, unpredictable and often unstable results