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"Youth Politics in Africa" published on by Oxford University Press.

The continued interest in political economy-inspired perspectives on economic and social policies is an attempt to understand policymakers as human beings who are influenced by values, votes and other factors that were once thought to be exogenous to policy choices. However, there is still little theorising about those on the other side of the policy equation. This article seeks a better understanding of how ordinary people engage in a very personal way with policy.
I present a model of participation grounded in empirical research with members of a poverty-reduction project in Ghana, and a conceptual framework informed by an interpretive or sense-making approach to policy analysis. The model is based on the three principles of 'subjectivity', 'temporality' and 'situatedness': First, human beings make subjective interpretations of policy grounded in their life histories; secondly, temporality is an inherent aspect of how individuals cognitively organise their lives; and thirdly, people experience policy as one of many overlapping contexts in which they are situated.

This paper examines the linked themes of identity and knowledge production embedded within the concept of insider scholarship. Insider scholarship may be described as the production of knowledge by a scholar about a group with which s/he identifies as a member. We are immediately compelled to complicate this definition by asking how any such group is delineated and how member- ship therein shapes knowledge production. The idea of insider scholarship thus evokes a series of queries about who produces what knowledge, about whom and for whom. The paper makes the argument that the discussion on insider scholarship has gained renewed relevance. In an effort to reclaim representa- tions of Africa and Africans, earlier generations of African scholars might some- times have based scholarly legitimacy on idealisations of race, culture and terri- tory. From that historical point, we appear to be in a moment when notions of 'cosmopolitanism' and 'universalism' make nonsense of any attempt to ground scholarship in complex and shifting identities. As the fourth generation of scholars comes into its own, one of its defining tasks will be to negotiate this contested terrain. This paper represents such an attempt. It argues that the concept of insider scholarship cannot simply be discarded as irrelevant. To do so would constitute an ill-advised neglect or woeful ignorance of the politics of represen- tation about Africa, and of the power differentials in different spaces within the field of African Studies. However, there are multiple grounds for claiming 'insiderness', and defining it by narrow parameters is unhelpful, if not damaging to any sense of common purpose. In light of this, I present 'shared struggle' as a strategic basis for reconstituting the theoretical value and the viable practice of insider scholarship. I conclude the paper by examining the implication of this conceptual shift.