A lingering nightmare: Achebe, Ofoegbu and Adichie on Biafra

This essay considers the impact of the 1967-1970 Biafran War on ordinary people's lives, through a comparative study of Achebe's Girls at War (1972), Ofoegbu's Blow the Fire (1985), and Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). The three books, a collection of short stories by the acclaimed Nigerian writer, the memoirs of a British lady married to a Nigerian recording her experience as a displaced civilian, and the second novel of a young Igbo writer born seven years after the war, provide a rich platform for a multifaceted approach of the war-shattered country from an insider's point of view. The study focuses on the impact of the armed conflict on daily lives and relationships, and reveals the festering wounds left by the war on Igbo conscience as manifested in its literature

Morality and institutions: an exploration

This paper explores the question of how culturally varying views of ‘morality’, ‘fairness’ and ‘justice’, particularly those held by the rural poor in developing countries, influence the way people evaluate,work within, use and (sometimes) resist, economic institutions – especially the institutions that emerge or are actively promoted during ‘development’ (market-oriented or otherwise)? It reviews the way this and related questions have been dealt with in a wide range of subjects, including social anthropology, institutional economics, economic sociology, experimental economics, and the study of rural protest. It then discusses how insights about morality and its interactions with institutions could be incorporated more widely into our understanding of the relationship between institutions and development and, in particular, whether we should begin to understand moralities as part of the wider domain of informal institutions which interact with formal institutions to shape behaviours

Unlikely Friends of the Authoritarian and Atheist Ruler: Religious Groups and Collective Contention in Rural China

This article examines the roles played by rural religious groups in China's local contentious politics. More specifically, it aims to explore whether religious groups stimulate or reduce collective contention when the ruler is both authoritarian and atheist. Drawing on national survey data and comparative case studies, this article finds that collective contention is less likely to occur in villages with religious groups that simultaneously overlap with secular social organizations and local authorities, and are hence more likely to serve as credible communication channels between local states and discontented citizens. This finding highlights two important issues that are often side-lined, if not outright neglected, in the existing literature. First, the relationship between religious groups and collective contention is diverse rather than uniform. Second, this relationship is shaped not only by religious groups but also by other important players in the local political arena

Imperfect identity

Questions of identity over time are often hard to answer. A long tradition has it that such questions are somehow soft: they have no unique, determinate answer, and disagreements about them are merely verbal. I argue that this claim is not the truism it is taken to be. Depending on how it is understood, it turns out either to be false or to presuppose a highly contentious metaphysical claim