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Space has been reintroduced as an analytical category to the humanities and social sciences in the early 1990s. African Studies is one of the fields of knowledge production where the so-called spatial turn has proved to be extremely fruitful. The continent provides ample evidence for complex processes of deterritorialisation (migration, globalisation, sub-nationalisms) and reterritorialisation (new regionalisms, processes of bordering, etc.). These dialectical processes are driven by a variety of actors: political elites, multinational companies, warlords, donor governments, local traders, international NGOs, etc. As a result substantial parts of Africa witness the emergence of new regimes of territoriality: re-ordered states, transnational and sub-national entities, new localities and transborder formations. This volume brings together contributions from anthropology, history, geography and political science.
Large-scale displacement - whether caused by war, state-related political or development projects, different forms of political violence, structural crisis, or even natural disasters - evokes many stereotyped assumptions about those forcibly displaced or emplaced. At the same time there is a problematic lack of attention paid to the diversity of actors, strategies and practices that reshape the world in the face (and chronic aftermath) of dramatic moments of violent dislocation. In this highly original volume, based on empirical case studies from across sub-Saharan Africa, the authors reveal the paradoxical effects, both intended and unexpected, that displacement produces, and that manifest themselves in displacement economies. An important contribution to a topic of growing scholarly and policy interest.
This guide provides an overview of the thematic areas, analytical aspects, and avenues of research which, together, form a broader conversation around doing spatial history. Spatial history is not a field with clearly delineated boundaries. For the most part, it lacks a distinct, unambiguous scholarly identity. It can only be thought of in relation to other, typically more established fields. Indeed, one of the most valuable utilities of spatial history is its capacity to facilitate conversations across those fields. Consequently, it must be discussed in relation to a variety of historiographical contexts. Each of these have their own intellectual genealogies, institutional settings, and conceptual path dependencies. With this in mind, this guide surveys the following areas: territoriality, infrastructure, and borders; nature, environment, and landscape; city and home; social space and political protest; spaces of knowledge; spatial imaginaries; cartographic representations; and historical GIS research.
After four decades of British rule in colonial Kenya, a previously unknown ethnic name—“Luyia”—appeared on the official census in 1948. The emergence of the Luyia represents a clear case of ethnic “invention.” At the same time, current restrictive theories privileging ethnic homogeneity fail to explain this defiantly diverse ethnic project, which now comprises the second-largest ethnic group in Kenya. In Cartography and the Political Imagination, which encompasses social history, geography, and political science, Julie MacArthur unpacks Luyia origins. In so doing, she calls for a shift to understanding geographic imagination and mapping not only as means of enforcing imperial power and constraining colonized populations, but as tools for articulating new political communities and dissent. Through cartography, Luyia ethnic patriots crafted an identity for themselves characterized by plurality, mobility, and cosmopolitan belonging. While other historians have focused on the official maps of imperial surveyors, MacArthur scrutinizes the ways African communities adopted and adapted mapping strategies to their own ongoing creative projects. This book marks an important reassessment of current theories of ethnogenesis, investigates the geographic imaginations of African communities, and challenges contemporary readings of community and conflict in Africa.
The edited collection Spatial Practices: Territory, Border and Infrastructure in Africa presents research findings from the German Research Council’s Priority Programme 1448 “Adaptation and Change in Africa” (2011-2018). At the heart of the volume are important new spatial practices that have emerged after the end of the Cold War in the fields of conflict, climate change, migration and urban development, to name but a few, and their ordering effects with regard to social relations. These findings bear particular relevance for the co-production of territorialities and sovereignties, for borders and migrations, as well as infrastructures and orders. Contributors are: Sabine Baumgart, Andrea Behrends, Marc Boeckler, Martin Doevenspeck, Ulf Engel, Claudia Gebauer, Karsten Giese, Katharina Heitz Tokpa, Shahadat Hossain, Anna Hüncke, Gabriel Klaeger, Kelly Si Miao Liang, Andreas Mehler, Felix Müller, Detlef Müller-Mahn, Wolfgang Scholz, Sophie Schramm, Jannik Schritt, Michael Stasik, Florian Weisser, Julia Willers, and Franzisca Zanker.
This book investigates governance practiced by non-state actors. It analyses how multinational mining companies protect their sites in fragile contexts and what that tells us about political ordering 'beyond' the state. Based on extensive primary research in the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, Europe and North America, the book compares companies' political role in the 19th and 21st centuries. It demonstrates that despite a number of disturbing parallels, many contemporary practices are not a reversion to the past but unique to the present. The book discloses hybrid security practices with highly ambiguous effects around the sites of contemporary companies that have committed to norms of corporate social and security responsibility. Companies invest in local communities, and offer human rights training to security forces alongside coercive techniques of fortress protection, and stability-oriented clientele practice and arrangements of indirect rule. The book traces this hybridity back to contradictory collective meaning systems that cross borders and structure the perceptions and choices of company managers, private security officers, NGO collaborators and others practitioners. The book argues that hybrid security practices are not the result of an encounter between a supposed ‘local’ with the liberal ‘global’. Instead, this hybridity is inherent in the transnational and part and parcel of liberal transnational governance. Therefore, more critical reflection of global governance in practice is required. These issues are sharply pertinent to liberal peacebuilding as well as global governance more broadly. The book will be of interest to anyone interested in business, politics and human rights; critical security studies; peacebuilding and statebuilding; African politics; and ethnographic and sociological approaches to global governance and international relations more generally.
This survey of various African and Asian conflicts examines people's experiences on territorial borders and the ways they affect political configurations. By focusing on individuals' routines and daily life, these contributions treat borderland dynamics as actual political units with their own actions and outcomes.
A radical, interdisciplinary reworking of legitimation, using ethnographic insights to explore everyday non-state authority in Tanzania.
This edited volume approaches regionalism as one potential pattern in a changing global order. Since the end of the Cold War, different forms of territorialization have emerged and we are confronted with an increasing number and variety of actors that are establishing regional projects. This volume offers an innovative contribution to the study of this new complexity by exploring constellations of regional actors, spatial scales and imaginations beyond state-centred perspectives as well as on multiple, often overlapping levels. The chapters analyse the emergence, trajectories and outcomes of regionalisms from the perspective of the Global South, specifically concentrating on regional projects in Latin America and Africa, but also in the Asia-Pacific. They attempt to identify the specific conditions and junctures of different forms of region-making in their external (global) and internal (local/national) dimensions. The volume also places special emphasis on interactions, spatial entanglements and comparisons between regionalisms in different parts of the world. By expanding beyond the perspective of North-South transfers, this book seeks to better understand the dynamics and diversity of interregional interactions. This volume will appeal to scholars of global studies, international political economy, international relations, human geography, and development studies, as well as area studies specialists who focus on Latin America and Africa.
This book investigates the ways in which people in the Lake Chad region that divides Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon deal with the crises of violence, jihadism, drought, and climate change that continue to afflict the area. In 2014 Boko Haram expanded into the Lake Chad region, prompting a counter-insurgency response, and exacerbating pre-existing social and ecological challenges. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, this book investigates how people within the liminal space of this key border region respond to and navigate the unpredictability which typifies their day-to-day lives. Building up a picture of individual and community experiences of crisis, the book gradually demonstrates the complex interactions between economic circuits, political orders, socio-religious processes, and labour practices which operate in the region. This book will be of interest to researchers across African studies, security studies, political science, and border studies.