Suchergebnisse

Do minority voters respond to co-racial or co-ethnic candidates? That is does the increased chance of substantive representation translate into increased participation? Here, we focus on this question among African American voters. While much of the empirical literature on this question has produced conflicting answers, recent studies suggest that minority candidates can significantly increase minority turnout. We argue that past work on this topic does not adequately account for the fact that minority voters in places with minority candidates may systematically differ in their level of participation than minority voters in places without minority candidates. In this study we address the weaknesses of previous research designs and offer a new design that exploits the redistricting process to gain additional leverage over this question. We find little evidence that African American voter turnout increases when voters are moved to African American candidates. We find some evidence that white voters, however, tend to vote at lower rates when they are represented by African American candidates.

In the last century, and up to the 1930s at least, the usual relationship in African Studies was that of expatriate specialist and African informants. (SJO)

African regional organizations have played leading roles in constructing collective conflict management rules for the continent, but these rules or norms have not been static. Currently, the African Union (AU) deploys monitors, authorizes peace support operations, and actively engages to resolve internal conflicts. Just a few decades ago, these actions would have been deeply controversial under the Organization of African Unity (OAU). What changed to allow for this transformation in the way the African regional organization approaches peace and security? African peace examines why the OAU chose norms in 1963 that prioritized state security and led to a policy of strict non-interference - even in the face of destabilizing violence - and why the AU chose very different norms leading to a disparate conflict management policy in the early 2000s. Even if the AU's capacity to respond to conflict is still developing, this new policy has made the region more willing and capable of responding to violence. Nash argues that norm creation largely happened within the African context, and international pressure was not a determinant factor in their evolution. The role of regions in the international order, particularly the African region, has been under-theorized and under-acknowledged, and this book adds to an emerging literature that explores the role of regional organizations in the Global South in creating and promoting norms based on their own experiences and for their own purposes.

The African liberation struggle fought against two intertwined forces, colonization and colonialism. The former implied physical occupation and dispossession of Africans' land, while the latter implied destruction of their culture. While "political independence" succeeded in an artificial and superficial sense in granting space for African cultural reclamation, this success presented little or no joy in restoring the dignified space that African women enjoyed in pre-colonial Africa. African women — in spite of the granting of "independence" and "freedom"— continue to be denied their freedom in African communities, and relegated to a second-class citizen status. I argue that if freedom is to have any significant meaning for Africans, it must prioritize the African cultural reclamation that puts African women in the center. This can and will be possible when Africans interrogate African philosophical assumptions about women's "place" in traditional Africa. A thorough exercise in this regard will assist in giving meaning to an African renaissance that will secure liberation not only for African men but also for women.

African and external approaches to security governance and reform have come to stress the importance of local, national and regional ownership, embodied at the national level by the concept of "local ownership" of Security Sector Reform and in the recourse to regional and sub-regional security mechanisms as "African solutions to African problems". While a normative consensus on this idea seems to have emerged in the policy sphere, we ask what traits can be discerned in the national and regional discourses and practices of security governance that might be plausibly considered specifically African. This article thus explores the discourses and practices of attempts to link aspects of security governance to specific times and places at the national and regional levels in Africa. Tracing the discursive recourse to identity across four eras of modern African history, we argue that specifically African traits of security governance at national and regional levels can be discerned in institutional legacies of repression and poor security governance, as well as the discursive commitment to norms of human security at the regional level, as embodied in the African Peace and Security Architecture.

Foreword by Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO ; Electronic version ; Incl. bibl.