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This book looks beyond the familiar history of former empires and new nation-states to consider newly transnational communities of solidarity and aid, social science and activism. Shortly after independence from France in 1960, the people living along the Sahel - a long, thin stretch of land bordering the Sahara - became the subjects of human rights campaigns and humanitarian interventions. Just when its states were strongest and most ambitious, the postcolonial West African Sahel became fertile terrain for the production of novel forms of governmental rationality realized through NGOs. The roots of this 'nongovernmentality' lay partly in Europe and North America, but it flowered, paradoxically, in the Sahel. This book is unique in that it questions not only how West African states exercised their new sovereignty but also how and why NGOs - ranging from CARE and Amnesty International to black internationalists - began to assume elements of sovereignty during a period in which it was so highly valued

Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 is, as its author Frederick Cooper tells us, a book about politics. It is equally a book about process. Both the politics and the process prove remarkably fluid, and restoring that fluidity to what has come to be seen as a static scenario is one of the book's key achievements. Cooper's story opens with France and its empire in shambles in the last years of World War II. By the time it comes to a close in 1960, France and formerly French sub-Saharan Africa have been remade in ways that none of the key actors of the time desired or even foresaw. The story of how that happened—of how an unwanted set of new nation-states emerged from an overextended and war-racked empire—provides the narrative arc of this dense, closely argued, and singular work.

These pages, excerpted from Gregory Mann's From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: the Road to Nongovernmentality , offer a succinct overview of its key points. Mann asks how it is that in the years following independence from French colonial rule, in a period when state sovereignty was highly valued, international NGOs took on some of the functions of government in the West African Sahel. He sketches the rise of ambitious and aggressive African governments, the effects of drought and famine, and the emergence of Human Rights campaigns that built on older anti-colonial and labor movements.

AbstractTwo young men met on a quay at the port in Conakry, Guinea in 1946. One, waiting dockside, was Mamadou Madeira Keita, a low-level civil servant and archivist. Years later, when he was a political prisoner in the Malian Sahara, some would argue that he was "the first francophone African ethnographer." The other, descending the gangplank, was the Frenchman Keita had come to meet. Georges Balandier was unknown then, but would soon become a leading figure in the fields of sociology and anthropology. The encounter between Keita and Balandier was foundational for both men. Conakry incubated a canonical intervention—Balandier's 1951 article "La Situation Coloniale"—that some attribute an ancestral role in a particular francophone tradition of postcolonial thought. Conakry, and Guinea at large, was also the crucible in which a powerful anti-colonial politics were forged by Madeira Keita and his allies. In this particular corner of West Africa, anti-colonial politics and an emergent, politically engaged social science conditioned each other, like the two strands of a double helix, each a necessary yet ultimately contingent element of the other's structure. Though these links did not last long, they had important effects. This article, by emphasizing the contingencies of the two men's intertwined biographies, seeks to carry out Balandier's dictate to emphasize the "concrete" nature of this particular situation in order to understand how and why anti-colonial politics and an innovative sociology converged and ultimately diverged.

Résumé L'article traite des discours politiques contemporains sur la colonisation en Afrique et sur l'historiographie qui les informe. Deux métaphores étroitement liées jouent un rôle central dans l'analyse : la dette, souvent décrite comme une « dette de sang » et la « facture », qu'on oppose ici au diagnostic d'une « fracture » sociale coloniale. En partant d'une question d'une simplicité trompeuse – la controverse autour de la dette de sang et des pensions payées aux anciens combattants africains de l'armée coloniale française – on étudiera le rôle donné à l'histoire coloniale dans les discours politiques contemporains en Côte d'Ivoire et en France, avant de revenir sur la pratique de l'écriture de l'histoire, à partir du cas du Mali contemporain. Les évocations du passé colonial – qui variant de la réconciliation à la recolonisation, et de la « fracture » à la « facture » – ont acquis une efficacité nouvelle dans le présent postcolonial parce qu'elles résonnent avec des angoisses vives autour du politique, de la communauté et de la souveraineté.

Several studies over the past two decades have presented varying degrees of evidence that an increased motive to serve the public good is prevalent in the public sector workforce. A widely accepted and measurable construct for public service motivation could have ramifications for public personnel managers in a number of key areas. This paper reviews the current literature on public service motivation (PSM) theory and examines how this desire to make a difference might e harnessed as a motivational force for human resource managers. The prevalence of PSM in the nonprofit sector is also explored as a means of broadening the current public-private dichotomy.