Suchergebnisse

This interview is taken from the collection of the Combating Terrorism Archive Project (CTAP). Dr. Letitia Lawson teaches courses on security, government and politics, history, and cultures in Africa. She frequently travels to the African continent as a faculty member for the Center for Civil-Military Relations (CCMR). Colonel Michael Mensch, former Africa program manager for CCMR, is currently a consultant on African affairs. On 8 December 2015, Nick Tomb talked with Dr. Lawson and COL Mensch about security and counterterrorism across the African continent.

ABSTRACTPrevious research on anti-corruption reform in Africa falls into two camps. The first explores 'best practices' and policy approaches to controlling corruption, while the second focuses on the politics of anti-corruption 'reform', arguing that official anti-corruption campaigns aim to mollify donors while using corruption charges instrumentally to undermine rivals and shore up personal loyalty to the president, and thus have no chance of controlling corruption. This paper suggests that, while the neopatrimonial context is a very significant limiting factor in anti-corruption reform, limited progress is possible. Examining the motivations and effects, intended and unintended, of anti-corruption reforms in Kenya and Nigeria, it finds that while the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission has indeed been politically marginalised and largely ineffectual, the more autonomous and activist, but politically instrumentalised, Economic and Financial Crimes Commission in Nigeria has had a measure of success. The analysis suggests that this is explained by the EFCC's independent prosecutorial powers and the institutionalisation strategies of its chairman.

The World Bank & its critics are approaching consensus on central issues in the African development debate. That Africa must become more integrated into the globalizing world economy, & that to do so effectively it will need more capable & socially responsive states is now broadly accepted. However, the manner in which African states are already embedded in their societies & in the global political economy has not been integrated into the analysis. The nature of these linkages tells us much about how African states engage the forces of globalization, & the effect that engagement is likely to have on economic development & on these states themselves. Adapted from the source document.

The World Bank and its critics are approaching consensus on central issues in the African development debate. That Africa must become more integrated into the globalising world economy, and that to do so effectively it will need more capable and socially responsive states is now broadly accepted. However, the manner in which African states are already embedded in their societies and in the global political economy has not been integrated into the analysis. The nature of these linkages tells us much about how African states engage the forces of globalisation, and the effect that engagement is likely to have on economic development and on these states themselves.

Asserts that the wave of democratic elections in sub-Saharan Africa after 1989 was driven largely by external democracy promotion efforts, & it is for this reason that democratic regimes there are now crumbling. Examination of the interaction between external democracy promotion efforts & domestic structural variables leads to the conclusion that, while the international community can induce reform & implant electoral processes in Africa, it cannot force sustainable democratic governance in the absence of capitalist economies, civil societies, & bureaucratic states. Adapted from the source document.

Africans "have begun moving away from colonially designed juridical statehood to fashion empirical formulas that respond to the messiness of their current realities. Only time will reveal whether these new, flexible structures prove an effective response to … state weakness."