Suchergebnisse

"This fifth edition of Historical Dictionary of Niger contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture"--

This paper makes the case for a political theory of African integration through a case study of the Union économique et monétaire ouest-africaine, a West African regional integration block based on a currency union and a common market. While economic theories have been widely used to analyze and advise on regional integration, this paper seeks to demonstrate that politics in fact takes precedence over economics in explaining their achievements, and posits the need for a political theory of regional integration in Africa. The case for this argument is made through a historical and technical analysis of the complex position of UEMOA and its commitment to two very different integration contexts, the Franc Zone and West African regional integration. The paper claims that UEMOA is trapped into a detrimental relationship with France through the currency mechanisms of the Franc Zone, but balances this with achievements, in the context of West African integration, that enable the conception of policies that may further advance and strengthen the integration project. Such policies would be best formulated as we develop a comprehensive political understanding of such processes.

Why Niger and India? Why compare two countries that are so patently different? The empirical challenge for this study was to find cases from the South that are different in terms of continental location, yet similar in terms of political system and reform policy. The difference of continental location is a proxy for the more substantial — as far as the objectives of the study are concerned — difference of historical process and its implications for our times, which is why the South-South Research Consortium, that has funded this project, has suggested that authors should compare cases across, rather than within the three southern continents.

"This book examines how the struggles for democracy over the past quarter century have affected the resilience of states in the region of the West African Sahel. Distinguished scholar-practitioners from the region provide detailed insights into these processes in Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad"--

Burkina Faso is an exception in the Sahel in that no politicisation and ideological radicalisation of Islam has taken shape in the public space. This paper - the first version of a chapter in an upcoming book - analyses both the causes and the implications of this fact. The historical analysis of the formative process of the Burkinabe nation reveals that Islamisation is a recent development in the country as compared to other parts of the Sahel. It came about as a result of the colonial transformation of societies in the area of future Burkina Faso, in the first half of the twentieth century and progressed in competition with Catholicism. While Islam later became the country's majority religion, the singular aspects of Burkina Faso's history - again, relative to its neighbours - have created a society marked by religious pluralism, and a very specific form of 'consensual secularism.' In this context, an Islamic public space has emerged where various doctrinal currents - modernist reformists, Wahhabis, Sufis – struggle to assert themselves, but which leads to an enduring combination of subordination to and partnership with Burkina's successive regimes, especially as influential Muslim merchants largely control the all-important trade economy of the country. This result does not imply that Muslims in Burkina are politically quiescent, but that they tend to mobilise politically not as Muslims, but as citizens of Burkina, as is testified by the country's stormy political history. The case therefore teaches us to avoid essentialising Muslims' existence in the political arena.