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There has been a long history of idealism concerning the potential of economic and political developments in Africa, the latest iteration of which emerged around the time of the 2007-8 global financial crisis. Here, Clive Gabay takes a historical approach to questions concerning change and international order as these apply to Africa in Western imaginaries. Challenging traditional postcolonial accounts that see the West imagine itself as superior to Africa, he argues that the centrality of racial anxieties concerning white supremacy make Africa appear, at moments of Western crisis, as the saviour of Western ideals, specifically democracy, bureaucracy, and neoclassical economic order. Uncommonly, this book turns its lens as much inwards as outwards, interrogating how changing attitudes to Africa over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries correspond to shifting anxieties concerning whiteness, and the growing hope that Africa will be the place where the historical genius of whiteness might be saved and perpetuated.-- Publisher's description

Introduction: Critical perspectives on liberal interventions and governmentality in Africa / Clive Gabay and Carl Death. - Engineering civil society in Africa / David Williams and Tom Young. - Governing rural poverty and development in postcolonial Zimbabwe : insights from Foucault's governmentality approach / Kudzai Matereke. - Legitimacy and governmentality in Tanzania : environmental mainstreaming in the developing world / Carl Death. - Business and the uses of "civil society" : governing Congolese mining areas / Jana Hönke. - Connecting state, citizen and society : the externalised context of community groups in Zambia / Karen Treasure. - Informality and the spaces of civil society in post-apartheid Johannesburg / Alex Wafer. - Citizenship, contested belonging and "civil society" as vernacular architecture / Morten Bøås. - Escaping statebuilding : resistance and civil society in the Democratic Republic of Congo / Marta Iñiguez de Heredia

Important scholarship in International Relations (IR) theory engages with the utopian tradition in order to render it 'realistic', whereby 'failed' utopian projects become necessarily unrealistic, and anti-political. The paper suggests such scholarship is informed by a narrow chronotic register, and a dichotomous ontology of chronos and kairos derived in part from the work of Karl Mannheim and E.H. Carr. As such, utopian scholarship in IR constructs a self-reinforcing relationship between change and realism, whereby only 'realistic' interventions can affect normatively desirable change, and therefore only interventions that are possible under current social and political conditions are normatively desirable. Drawing on the idea that the quest for utopia must always fail, the paper suggests that IR theory should be far more attuned to 'failure' than as simply a phenomenon that helps define the boundary between the realistic and unrealistic. The paper draws on non-canonical literatures from utopian studies and anarchism, to furnish an alternative 'no-point' form of utopianism that dissolves the chronos/kairos binary and thus engages neither in universalist and violent end-point, nor institutionally compromised 'mid-range' utopianism. This acts to reconceptualise 'failure' in excess of itself, a productive site for IR scholarship, and a political archive for movements and struggles to learn from.

Then UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn's attendance at a Passover Seder organised by the radical leftist group, Jewdas, in April 2018, led to a brief but vitriolic controversy involving Anglo-Jewish umbrella organisations concerning who qualifies to speak as a Jew. This article uses this controversy to engage with Judith Butler's attempt to address this question, suggesting that in decentring Zionist claims to Jewish subjectivity she fails to take account of how different Jewish subjectivities are formed, and thus ends up proposing a 'good Jew/bad Jew' binary that dissolves Jewishness into universal humanism. Drawing on the work of the German-Jewish mystical anarchist Gustav Landauer (1870–1919), the article proposes a different way of understanding subjectivity that retains ontological inherency as a plausible precondition for ethical solidarity. As such, the article's argument has implications not merely for a reworked understanding of Jewish subjectivity but for the politics of subject formation more broadly.

AbstractImportant scholarship in International Relations (IR) theory engages with the utopian tradition in order to render it 'realistic', whereby 'failed' utopian projects become necessarily unrealistic, and anti-political. The paper suggests such scholarship is informed by a narrow chronotic register, and a dichotomous ontology of chronos and kairos derived in part from the work of Karl Mannheim and E.H. Carr. As such, utopian scholarship in IR constructs a self-reinforcing relationship between change and realism, whereby only 'realistic' interventions can affect normatively desirable change, and therefore only interventions that are possible under current social and political conditions are normatively desirable. Drawing on the idea that the quest for utopia must always fail, the paper suggests that IR theory should be far more attuned to 'failure' than as simply a phenomenon that helps define the boundary between the realistic and unrealistic. The paper draws on non-canonical literatures from utopian studies and anarchism, to furnish an alternative 'no-point' form of utopianism that dissolves the chronos/kairos binary and thus engages neither in universalist and violent end-point, nor institutionally compromised 'mid-range' utopianism. This acts to reconceptualise 'failure' in excess of itself, a productive site for IR scholarship, and a political archive for movements and struggles to learn from.

When Joyce Banda became Malawi's president in 2012, she was welcomed by the international community as an antidote to the increasingly erratic and autocratic behaviour of her unexpectedly deceased predecessor Bingu wa Mutharika. Banda appeared to be the product of the twin drivers of a 'rising' Africa; namely a newly empowered donor-supported civil society on the one hand, and a Western-oriented political elite committed to transparency and good governance on the other. Based on several field trips to Malawi over the past five years, this article seeks to problematise the degree to which Joyce Banda and Malawi's civil society organisations represented a double transition from the more patrimonial form of politics which had dominated the political and civil society sectors throughout Malawi's postcolonial era. Although prepared prior to recent corruption scandals which have engulfed the Banda government in the run-up to elections in May 2014, this article sets the context for understanding these cases as a product of Malawi's political economy and uneven insertion into the global economy.