New Books in African Studies

Drawing on a rare cross-regional comparison, Playing with Fire: Parties and Political Violence in Kenya and India (Cambridge UP, 2024) develops a novel explanation about ethnic party violence. Combining rich historical, qualitative, and quantitative data, the book demonstrates how levels of party instability can crucially inform the decisions of political elites to organize or support violence. Centrally, it shows that settings marked by unstable parties are more vulnerable to experiencing recurring and major episodes of party violence than those populated by durable parties. This is because transient parties enable politicians to disregard voters' future negative reactions to conflict. By contrast, stable party organizations compel politicians to take such costs into account, thereby dampening the potential for recurring and severe party violence. By centering political parties as key actors in the production of conflict, and bringing together evidence from both Africa and South Asia, Playing with Fire contributes new insights to the study of political violence.Yash is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the School of Public and International Affairs, University of Cincinnati. His research is focused on the interactions of political mobilization and anti-minority violence within Hindu nationalist organizations in India. Twitter. Email: sharmaym@mail.uc.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Marie-Eve Desrosiers (Univ. of Ottawa) has written a wonderful book. Trajectories of Authoritarianism in Rwanda: Elusive Control Before the Genocide (Cambridge University Press, 20203) challenges scholarly and policy assumptions about the strength and control of authoritarian governments in Rwanda in the decades before the 1994 genocide. Desrosiers employs original archival data and interviews to highlight the complex relations between authorities, opponents, and society. Through careful, detailed analysis, Desrosiers offers a nuanced assessment of the functions and evolution of authoritarianism over time, demonstrating how the governments of Rwanda's first two post-independence Republics (1962- 1990) sought and often struggled to cement their rule. Whilst the deeper, lived realities of authoritarianism are generally neglected by multi-case comparisons at the heart of comparative authoritarian studies, this illuminating survey highlights the essential, yet subtle authoritarian strategies, patterns, and forms of decay that are too often overlooked when addressing authoritarian contexts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

South Africa remains the only state that developed a nuclear weapons capability, but ultimately decided to dismantle existing weapons and abandon the programme. Disarming Apartheid: The End of South Africa's Nuclear Weapons Programme and Accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, 1968–1991 (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Robin E. Möser reconstructs the South African decision-making and diplomatic negotiations over the country's nuclear weapons programme and its international status, drawing on new and extensive archival material and interviews.This deeply researched study brings to light a unique disarmament experience. It traces the country's previously neglected path towards accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Rather than relying primarily on US government archives, the book joins the burgeoning field of national nuclear histories based on unprecedented access to policymakers and documents in the country studied. Robin E. Möser, in addition to providing access to important new documents, offers original interpretations that enrich the study of nuclear politics for historians and political scientists.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Well into the early nineteenth century, Luanda, the administrative capital of Portuguese Angola, was one of the most influential ports for the transatlantic slave trade. Between 1801 and 1850, it served as the point of embarkation for more than 535,000 enslaved Africans. In the history of this diverse, wealthy city, the gendered dynamics of the merchant community have frequently been overlooked.Vanessa S. Oliveira traces how existing commercial networks adapted to changes in the Atlantic slave trade during the first half of the nineteenth century. Slave Trade and Abolition: Gender, Commerce, and Economic Transition in Luanda (U Wisconsin Press, 2021) reveals how women known as donas (a term adapted from the title granted to noble and royal women in the Iberian Peninsula) were often important cultural brokers. Acting as intermediaries between foreign and local people, they held high socioeconomic status and even competed with the male merchants who controlled the trade. Oliveira provides rich evidence to explore the many ways this Luso-African community influenced its society. In doing so, she reveals an unexpectedly nuanced economy with regard to the dynamics of gender and authority. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Women, Agency, and the State in Guinea: Silent Politics (Routledge, 2020) examines how women in Guinea articulate themselves politically within and outside institutional politics. It documents the everyday practices that local female actors adopt to deal with the continuous economic, political, and social insecurities that emerge in times of political transformations.Carole Ammann argues that women's political articulations in Muslim Guinea do not primarily take place within women's associations or institutional politics such as political parties; but instead women's silent forms of politics manifest in their daily agency, that is, when they make a living, study, marry, meet friends, raise their children, and do household chores. The book also analyses the relationship between the female population and the local authorities, and discusses when and why women's claim making enjoys legitimacy in the eyes of other men and women, as well as representatives of 'traditional' authorities and the local government.Paying particular attention to intersectional perspectives, this book will be of interest to scholars of African studies, social anthropology, political anthropology, the anthropology of gender, urban anthropology, gender studies, and Islamic studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Over the course of the Almoravid (1040–1147) and Almohad (1121–1269) dynasties, mediaeval Marrakesh evolved from an informal military encampment into a thriving metropolis that attempted to translate a local and distinctly rural past into a broad, imperial architectural vernacular. In Marrakesh and the Mountains: Landscape, Urban Planning, and Identity in the Medieval Maghrib (Penn State University Press, 2024), Dr. Abbey Stockstill convincingly demonstrates that the city’s surrounding landscape provided the principal mode of negotiation between these identities.The contours of mediaeval Marrakesh were shaped in the twelfth-century transition between the two empires of Berber origin. These dynasties constructed their imperial authority through markedly different approaches to urban space, reflecting their respective concerns in communicating complex identities that fluctuated between paradigmatically Islamic and distinctly local. Using interdisciplinary methodologies to reconstruct this urban environment, Dr. Stockstill broadens the analysis of Marrakesh’s mediaeval architecture to explore the interrelated interactions among the city’s monuments and its highly resonant landscape. Marrakesh and the Mountains integrates Marrakesh into the context of urbanism in the wider Islamic world and grants the Almoravid and Almohad dynasties agency over the creation and instantiation of their imperial capital.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Perpetrators of mass atrocities have used displacement to transport victims to killing sites or extermination camps to transfer victims to sites of forced labor and attrition, to ethnically homogenize regions by moving victims out of their homes and lands, and to destroy populations by depriving them of vital daily needs. Displacement has been treated as a corollary practice to crimes committed, not a central aspect of their perpetration. Destroy Them Gradually: Displacement as Atrocity (Rutgers UP, 2024) examines four cases that illuminate why perpetrators have destroyed populations using displacement policies: Germany’s genocide of the Herero (1904–1908); Ottoman genocides of Christian minorities (1914–1925); expulsions of Germans from East/Central Europe (1943–1952); and climate violence (twenty-first century). Because displacement has been typically framed as a secondary aspect of mass atrocities, existing scholarship overlooks how perpetrators use it as a means of executing destruction rather than a vehicle for moving people to a specific location to commit atrocities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Inequality and Political Cleavage in Africa: Regionalism by Design (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Catherine Boone integrates African countries into broader comparative theories of how spatial inequality shapes political competition over the construction of markets, states, and nations. Existing literature on African countries has found economic cleavages, institutions, and policy choices to be of low salience in national politics. This book inverts these arguments. Dr. Boone trains our analytic focus on the spatial inequalities and territorial institutions that structure national politics in Africa, showing that regional cleavages find expression in both electoral competition and policy struggles over redistribution, sectoral investment, market integration, and state design.Leveraging comparative politics theory, Dr. Boone argues that African countries' regional and core-periphery tensions are similar to those that have shaped national economic integration in other parts of the world. Bringing together electoral and economic geography, the book offers a new and powerful map of political competition on the African continent.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

In Automotive Empire: How Cars and Roads Fueled European Colonialism in Africa (Cornell University Press, 2024), Dr. Andrew Denning uncovers how roads and vehicles began to transform colonial societies across Africa but rarely in the manner Europeans expected. Like seafaring ships and railroads, automobiles and roads were more than a mode of transport—they organised colonial spaces and structured the political, economic, and social relations of empire, both within African colonies and between colonies and the European metropole.European officials in French, Italian, British, German, Belgian, and Portuguese territories in Africa shared a common challenge—the transport problem. While they imagined that roads would radiate commerce and political hegemony by collapsing space, the pressures of constructing and maintaining roads rendered colonial administration thin, ineffective, and capricious. Automotive empire emerged as the European solution to the transport problem, but revealed weakness as much as it extended power.As Automotive Empire reveals, motor vehicles and roads seemed the ideal solution to the colonial transport problem. They were cheaper and quicker to construct than railroads, overcame the environmental limitations of rivers, and did not depend on the recruitment and supervision of African porters. At this pivotal moment of African colonialism, when European powers transitioned from claiming territories to administering and exploiting them, automotive empire defined colonial states and societies, along with the brutal and capricious nature of European colonialism itself.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Jane-Marie Collins's book Emancipatory Narratives & Enslaved Motherhood: Bahia, Brazil, 1830-1888 (Liverpool UP, 2023) examines three major currents in the historiography of Brazilian slavery: manumission, miscegenation, and creolisation. It revisits themes central to the history of slavery and race relations in Brazil, updates the research about them, and revises interpretations of the role of gender and reproduction within them. First, about the preponderance of women and children in manumission; second, about the association of black female mobility with intimate inter-racial relations; third, about the racialised and gendered routes to freed status; and fourth, about the legacies of West African female socio-economic behaviours for modalities of family and freedom in nineteenth-century Salvador da Bahia, Brazil.The central concern within the book is how African and African descendant women navigated enslaved motherhood and negotiated the divide between enslavement and freedom for themselves and their children. The book is, therefore, organised around the subject position of the enslaved mother and the reproduction of her children in enslavement, while the condition of enslaved motherhood is examined through overlapping historical praxis evidenced in nineteenth-century Bahia: contested freedom, racialised mothering, and competing maternal interests - biological, ritual, surrogate. The point at which these interests converged historically was, it is argued, a conflict over black female reproductive rights. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies