Publications

Africa is the world’s youngest continent, with over 70 per cent of its population aged under 30 years. Several African governments, individually and collectively, have implemented laws and policies aimed at maximising the potential that the young population brings to the economy. This ranges from creating avenues for employment through agriculture to investment in the entertainment industry, vocational training, industrial development, and fostering trade through regional economic communities. With all these efforts, African governments have not been able to completely absorb the continental workforce in the domestic labour market, thereby fortifying the need for labour externalisation. However, the emergence of labour externalisation programmes has seen the rise of reports of African youths being abused, exploited, dispossessed of their passports and having their body organs harvested without their consent. Nevertheless, there is a dearth of literature analysing these incidents, their relation with the crime of human trafficking, as well as the legal and policy safeguards against these incidents. This chapter fills this void by analysing the legal norms in East Africa with Tanzania as a case study.

This book provides a historical inquiry into the quantification of needs in humanitarian assistance. Needs are increasingly seen as the lowest common denominator of humanity. Standard definitions of basic needs, however, set a minimalist version of humanity - both in the sense that they are narrow in what they compare, and that they set a low bar for satisfaction. The book argues that we cannot understand humanitarian governance if we do not understand how humanitarian agencies made human suffering commensurable across borders in the first place. The book identifies four basic elements of needs: As a concept, as a system of classification and triage, as a material apparatus, and as a set of standards. Drawing on a range of archival sources, including the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF), and ehe Sphere Project, the book traces the concept of needs from its emergence in ehe 1960s right through to ehe present day, and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's call for "evidence-based humanitarianism." Finally, the book assesses how the international governmentality of needs has played out in a recent humanitarian crisis, drawing on field research on Central African refugees in the Cameroonian borderland in 2014-2016. This irnportant historical inquiry into the universal nature of human suffering will be an important read for humanitarian researchers and practitioners, as well as readers wich an interest in international history and development.

This study focused on how EU officials interpret iconic pictures depicting Zimbabwe’s Crisis, especially in light of the country’s national image and economic dynamics. Generally, the study centred on the respondents’ feelings, memories, descriptions and remarks about the above-mentioned pictures. Specifically, the study explored the respondents’ remarks about the pictures in question vis-à-vis Zimbabwe’s national image and economic trajectory. This study was motivated by the fact that, despite the existence of numerous pictures depicting Zimbabwe’s political and economic predicament, studies focusing on such pictorial material remain extremely scant. Instead, there is a widespread tendency by scholars to focus on the verbal, rhetorical and statistical narrative of Zimbabwe’s Crisis at the expense of its pictorial dimension. Such a tendency has relegated the pictures in question to the periphery, yet they could augment the Zimbabwe Crisis debate. Therefore, this study sought to bridge such a scholarship lacuna by delving on Zimbabwe’s Crisis from a visual-cultural perspective in general, and from a pictorial point of view, in particular. Studying the afore-mentioned pictures dovetails with the theoretical discourse of image science/Bildwissenschaft and iconology which underpin this study. The data collection exercise for this study was twofold: (1) collection of pictures, and; (2) data collection through interviews. Accordingly, eight iconic (still) pictures and two moving pictures (videos) were collected from Aljazeera English, BBC, CNN and France 24’s online archives. Thereafter, 25 key informant interviews based on the same pictures were conducted with Members of the European Parliament (Brussels), officials from the European Commission (Brussels) and EU’s diplomatic post in Zimbabwe. Before the interviews, the researcher studied the pictures in question using Marotzki and Stoetzer’s (2006) model of pictorial analysis. This was done to understand the pictures from a “scientific” perspective and to subtly compare the results with those from the EU officials. The studying of the pictures using the above-mentioned model revealed their capacity to stir emotions, especially anger, fear, horror, sympathy and helplessness. It was also concluded that that the pictures in question projected symbols related to Marxism, police state, war, Zimbabwean culture and extreme suffering. Also, in the two videos studied; the ironic, artistic and aesthetic use of metapictures to portray violence and suffering stands out. After the analysis of the data collected through key informant interviews, the study established several findings and conclusions. In sync with the school of thought which advances the nexus between pictures and emotions, the study concluded that the pictures under study, evoked deep emotions and public outcry. The study also observed the dominance of the pictures in question over verbal and statistical narratives, particularly from an emotional and memorial point of view. Ironically, the study concluded that due to their viral nature and repeated broadcasting, the pictures under study lost their impact over time as their consumers became “insulated” from their emotive capabilities. Concerning the respondents’ remarks on the pictures under study, the analysis of the collected data revealed that, the pictures in question provoked state sponsored iconoclasm in Zimbabwe. Another conclusion emanating from what the respondents said about the pictures in question, indicated that the pictures under study led to the emergence of two antagonistic camps which can be described as; (1) the iconophobes and iconoclasts (represented by the state) and; (2) journalists who leaned towards the iconophilic and iconodules camp. The former group represent those who destroyed and suppressed images whereas the latter represent those who pictorially documented Zimbabwe’s Crisis and exposed its pictures to the outside world. Also, it was concluded that the state, through colossal propaganda, created a counter image, in an effort to counteract physical and metaphorical images about Zimbabwe in the international media. In addition, racial and gender bias in terms of pictorial representation of the victims by the international media houses in question, was also underlined. In addition, the study also established that the pictorial images that were studied represented the reality on the ground which somehow influenced the EU’s decision to impose “smart” sanctions, travel restrictions and investment warnings on Zimbabwe. Importantly, the study concluded that, apart from painting a gloom and grim image about Zimbabwe, the pictures under study also acted as a mirror which projected multiple and negative images ranging from racism, violence and hostility, lawlessness, failed state, to inflation and economic meltdown. Such a scenario was argued to be an antithesis to tourism and foreign direct investment. The study also observed that since the respondents interpreted the pictures from an institutional and authoritative position, they therefore “read” the pictures from a “straitjacket” or “blinkered” point of view, which most likely blurred their interpretation. Despite different ideological and political affiliations, there were no significant variations in the way Members of the European Parliament (Brussels), officials from the European Commission (Brussels) and EU Delegation to Zimbabwe (Harare) interpreted the pictures under study. In line with the respondents’ remarks vis-à-vis the pictures selected for this study, pitfalls associated with pictures were highlighted. In the same wavelength, it was pointed out that technological advancement has exposed pictures to manipulation or “photoshopping,” which ultimately affects their interpretation and perception by their consumers. Also, it was pointed out that pictures do not always portray the “full picture” of any given scenario since they are prone to the vices of subjectivity and selectivity. Selectivity, which leads to subjective perceptions, is a process whereby journalists select certain pictures for broadcasting at the expense of others, according to personal and institutional expediency. In terms of academic contribution, this study is one of the foremost to study pictures depicting Zimbabwe’s Crisis. It therefore represents an academic paradigm shift from the traditional study of the country’s crisis which is largely verbal, narrative and statistical in nature. Therefore, this study is directly the opposite of the traditional approach which tends to reduce the pictures in question to footnotes of the country’s crisis debate. Moreover, the study used image science as its theoretical yardstick, hence, its unique “scientific” contribution in that respect. From a political point of view, conclusions related to the nexus between and among pictures, Zimbabwe’s national image and economic trajectory could be of interest to policymakers, civic society, diplomats and political parties in Zimbabwe.

Como podemos falar de identidades em países que foram colonizados, sem reproduzir incontestadamente as categorizações dos colonizadores? Como podemos (re)valorizar os saberes dos grupos marginalizados, sem negar as suas relações complexas com as culturas hegemônicas? Enfim, como podemos fazer pesquisa sobre processos identitários, sem ocultar a nossa própria inserção nas estruturas de poder? A partir dessas questões, o objetivo principal da minha contribuição para este livro é fazer uma reflexão crítica sobre os processos identitários que acontecem no decorrer das nossas pesquisas. Concomitantemente, pretendo realçar a importância de uma (co)produção de conhecimentos que visa superar, na medida do possível, as relações desiguais de poder-saber. Para isso, convém combinar as perspectivas de diferentes autores do Sul e do Norte Global, representando diversos contextos socioculturais, identificações étnico-raciais, gêneros e disciplinas acadêmicas. Entre eles destacam-se o francês Pierre Bourdieu, a argentina Irene Vasilachis de Gialdino, o português Boaventura de Sousa Santos e o brasileiro Milton Santos. Cabe acrescentar que o artigo está enfocado na pesquisa social qualitativa que implica trabalho de campo, mesmo que muitas das noções expostas possam ser aplicadas também a outras áreas de conhecimento. A minha reflexão concluirá com uma manifestação a favor de diálogos que ultrapassam barreiras culturais, hierarquias de poder e fronteiras disciplinares. Ao todo, esse artigo é um apelo para que cada um de nós questione as dinâmicas identitárias que distorcem a própria visão e valorize os conhecimentos dos sujeitos que pretende conhecer, respeitando tanto a igualdade como as diferenças.

This experience report summarises the findings from an online survey dataset consists of 102 respondents from 33 countries from the global North and South. Using an independent non-parametric t-test, we found a significant difference in the way both sides used certain technologies and platforms to collaborate with their colleagues, as well as the factors affecting their ability to work from home during the pandemic.

Climate variability negatively affected Sub-Saharan Africa’s agricultural production. Due to drastic change in climate conditions and its adverse impacts on crop production, climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is considered as a technological and policy solution to mitigate the impact of climate variability on crop production. Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is the sustainable form of agriculture that aims to increase productivity, improve adaptation, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. This study assesses the impacts of climate variability and CSA practices on crop production in Konso cultural landscapes, Ethiopia. The study employed multiple linear regression models to examine the effects of climate variability on crop production and an endogenous switching regression model to assess the impact of CSA practices on crop production. The findings show that climate variability explains 37.4–47.5% of the annual variation in crop production. During the study period (1983–2016), the seasonal production variability range was much wider (10–67%) for three crops: sorghum, maize, and teff (Eragrostis tef). The results also reveal that application of CSA practices such as crop diversification, terracing, manure, irrigation, and rainwater harvesting have positive impacts on crop production. Households that use CSA practices show a significant (p < 0.01) increase in crop production compared to non-users. The high variability in rainfall and warming temperatures results in a decreasing trend in crop yield. On the other hand, the application of CSA practices results in a significant increase in crop productivity in the face of climate variability. In terms of broader policy implications, the culturally intertwined CSA practices in Konso could be used as a learning platform to plan and scale out by integrating them with innovative conservation technologies to achieve widespread adoption in other parts of Ethiopia and elsewhere.

The contemporary currency hierarchy is neither natural nor neutral: It’s an imperial construct. This paper traces the origins of today’s currency hierarchy back to the violent imposition of imperial money. Through a longue durée analysis of Nigeria (1861–1960), this paper demonstrates how British imperialism dismantled pre-colonial monetary plurality and imposed Sterling, institutionalised in 1912 via the West African Currency Board (WACB), an institution requiring 100% Sterling reserves. Archival evidence reveals three mechanisms to establish imperial money: (1) legal demonetisation of pre-colonial currencies; (2) overvalued Sterling distorting domestic prices; (3) tax collection and wage payment. These processes restructured labour and production across the colonised regions, birthing a disarticulated economy, where Nigeria exported raw materials and cash-cropss but relied on imports for basic needs - a template replicated globally then and now. Key findings include first, how imperial money’s monopoly relied on violent demonetization; second, the WACB’s reserves prefigured modern foreign exchange traps; and last, people have continuously resisted to preserve monetary sovereignty. By reframing currency hierarchies as products of imperial extraction, the study challenges IPE’s presentist focus and charts a path for decolonial monetary alternatives.

During the Second World War, 2,700 Greek refugees lived in camps in Eastern Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi. They had escaped from the German Nazi occupation and famine conditions on the Aegean Islands. Their movement through Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Kenya, Tanganyika and Uganda was part of a more extensive network of refugee hosting and transfer, orchestrated by British officials in Cairo and guided by strategic interests in London. This article uncovers this overlooked episode and situates it in the broader history of the thousands of European refugees who found refuge in the Middle East and Africa. It argues that this was part of a more extensive system of imperial refugee management with implications for the history of the British Empire and the international refugee regime. Adding to the historiography of the empire’s war effort, it uncovers the contribution of Africans to hosting distressed European refugees. It further highlights the importance of imperial rule in the emergence of the post-war international refugee regime. Due to the racism of the colonial division of labour and society, European refugees in Africa enjoyed a comparably comfortable situation. The imperial refugee regime cared well for its white subjects, housing them in some of the most privileged refugee camps of the world.

This chapter scrutinises the negotiation of various actors about the governance of the Mauritanian Islamic heritage. In the context of hopes for democratisation and the war on terror, social frictions are fuelled and lead to a quite confrontational mode of negotiating identity and citizenship. The traditional Islamic educational institution, the maḥḍara, plays a crucial role within these debates. Being perceived as an institution for (re)producing local tradition, the maḥḍara and its visions become the focus of conflict, praised by politicians and the ʿulamāʾ (Islamic scholars) as a driver of social peace, feared by security experts as a breeding ground for terrorism, and finally, wished to be reformed by human right activists. The war on terror goes hand in hand with the threat of terror, producing more rumours than facts and spreading feelings of insecurity that foster violent action.

The present volume is a pioneering collection of poetry by the outstanding Kenyan poet, intellectual and imam Ustadh Mahmmoud Mau (born 1952) from Lamu island, once an Indian Ocean hub, now on the edge of the nation state. By means of poetry in Arabic script, the poet raises his voice against social ills and injustices troubling his community on Lamu. The book situates Mahmoud Mau’s oeuvre within transoceanic exchanges of thoughts so characteristic of the Swahili coast. It shows how Swahili Indian Ocean intellectual history inhabits an individual biography and writings. Moreover, it also portrays a unique African Muslim thinker and his poetry in the local language, which has so often been neglected as major site for critical discourse in Islamic Africa. The selected poetry is clustered around the following themes: jamii: societal topical issues, ilimu: the importance of education, huruma: social roles and responsabilities, matukio: biographical events and maombi: supplications. Prefaced by Rayya Timamy (Nairobi University), the volume includes contributions by Jasmin Mahazi, Kai Kresse and Kadara Swaleh, Annachiara Raia and Clarissa Vierke. The authors’ approaches highlight the relevance of local epistemologies as archives for understanding the relationship between reform Islam and local communities in contemporary Africa.

This article analyzes the development of the Murabitun in South Africa and the impact of their ideology against the background of a promise of the end of time for the persisting modes of segregation and injustice. It asks how indigeneity as Blackness is merged with a Sufi-oriented vision of a purified, revived Islamic community. The material presented here forms part of a research project on converts to Islam in the Black African townships and former homelands of South Africa alongside the challenging social and spatial modes of ordering by translating Blackness into the realm of Muslim practice and ideology. The empirical data for this article derive from qualitative fieldwork conducted in the province of KwaZulu-Natal in 2015 and 2016. These will be discussed together with a critical review of selected texts by the founder of the Shadhili Darqawi order, also known as the Murabitun World Movement, Abdalqadir as Sufi, a Scottish convert to Islam and founder of the Sufi tariqah who began his ideological outreach and da’wah activities (Islamic missionary work) in South Africa in the 1980s.

There is no unproblematic way to study things as “African”, yet an epistemologically situated approach based on concrete technological projects situated in Africa and their social and political implications offers an important account of the intersection of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and African Studies. We explore this perspective through the notion of “indiscipline” using the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope project (SKA) based in South Africa as a case study through which to observe “indiscipline” as a methodological approach to technoscience at work. Indiscipline helps frame the socio-technical (by)products of astrophysics and engineering, and we present the production of ventilators for COVID-19 patients as an example of how the design of mega-science projects can become entangled with the dynamic concerns of society. Our conclusion elaborates on the politics of large technological systems, opening up a conversation on the intersection of science and society in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in African settings, using the template of experiences with the SKA and the National Ventilator Project in South Africa.

African (postcolonial) societies function as collectivist group-based cultures. The worth of the individual is often measured in terms of the worth of their group. The individual, therefore, prioritises the defence and preservation of the group’s face even above theirs. Using data collected from an out-of-studio radio programme in Cameroon, I demonstrate how individual lives and faces are often subsumed into the group’s face in these interactions that take place in the public sphere. Relying on the postcolonial pragmatics framework, I analyse this specific Cameroon English discourse for markers of collectivist group values and social norms, and for how interlocutors factor these into their social interactions. They adopt and perform asymmetrical kinship, social affective roles and tasks, give and take advice, and reproach and accept blame in line with societal norms built on interlocutors’ age, social status, social hierarchy and sometimes gender. Performing these potentially (individual) degrading acts in public shows how strong allegiance is to the collectivist group, its culture and norms.

This volume explores an understudied aspect of courts: The extent to which informal institutions and relational networks (e.g., professional, clientelist, family etc.) relations affect how courts are organised and operate. For instance, to what extent can ‘good personal relations’ outweigh professional merits in judicial appointment processes? Or in what ways do international or domestic judicial networks help protect courts against other branches of power?

Informality in international judicial selection practices has been acknowledged but rarely systematically researched. Described as “design innovations” that are hard to grasp, national judicial appointments to international courts (ICs), even in the most established democracies, are permeated by opacity and secretiveness that remains puzzling to researchers and the legal complex alike. This article presents evidence from three African sub-regional courts to reify the informal dimension of international judicial appointments. Drawing on qualitative research that employs two country case studies, Uganda and Malawi, we demonstrate how the particularly thin formal selection rules leave much leverage to informalities at various levels of governance. Through interviews and judicial biographical data, we reconstruct judicial appointment practices and their dynamics to account for relevant informalities and relations that shed light on the selection of judges to ICs. We argue that appointment practices are less ad hoc or arbitrary than they often appear but mirror the states’ commitment to regional integration, political assessment of the respective regional organisation, and perceptions of the courts’ relevance and ambitions in relation to the political appointers and selectors. Moreover, we raise new concerns about the risk of more silent and subtle backlash against bold regional courts.

Recent scholarship on judicial politics has highlighted the relevance of informal judicial networks and relations as a prerequisite for protecting judicial autonomy and independence. Relational dynamics unravel the concealed but salient ties and entanglements that inform, steer and shape the nature of judicial-executive relations. Our paper keeps in conversation with this strand of research and asks whether and how informalities feature in and influence judicial appointments to African Regional Economic Community (REC) courts. To conceptualise the governance and patterns of judicial appointments, we use an originally compiled dataset comprising all 105 judges who serve(d) on the four operational African Union sanctioned REC courts. We also draw on interview material to divulge the informal dimension of the appointment processes whilst accounting for their variations across regime types. We show that the formal selection rules are particularly thin, leaving much leverage to informal processes at various levels of governance. We, therefore, argue that appointments tell us at least part of the informal selection story from two angles: the merits, ties and efforts that enhance the chances of individuals getting selected, as well as the appointers’ strategies and criteria for selecting specific individuals from a larger pool of candidates.

Recently, there have been significant efforts in the integration of in-situ and satellite observations for effective monitoring of coastal areas (e.g., the Copernicus program of the European Space Agency). In this study, a 15-year diurnal variation of Water Constituent Concentrations (WCCs) was retrieved from multi-sensor satellite images and in-situ hyperspectral measurements using Radiative Transfer (RT) modeling in the Dutch Wadden Sea. The existing RT model 2SeaColor was inverted against time series of in-situ hyperspectral measurements of water leaving reflectances (Rrs [sr−1]) for the simultaneous retrieval of WCCs (i.e., Chlorophyll-a (Chla), Suspended Particulate Matter (SPM), Dissolved Organic Matter (CDOM)) on a daily basis between 2003 and 2018 at the NIOZ jetty station (the NJS) located in the Dutch part of the Wadden Sea. At the same time, the existing coupled atmosphere-hydro-optical RT model MOD2SEA was used for the simultaneous retrieval of WCCs from time series of multi-sensor satellite images of the MEdium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) onboard ENVISAT, Multispectral Instrument (MSI) onboard Sentinel-2 and Ocean and Land Colour Instrument (OLCI) onboard Sentinel-3 between 2003 and 2018 over the Dutch Wadden Sea. At the NJS, a direct comparison (Taylor diagram and statistical analysis) showed strong agreement between in-situ and satellite-derived WCC values (Chla: R2 ≥ 0.70, RMSE ≤7.5 [mg m−3]; SPM: R2 ≥ 0.72, RMSE ≤5.5 [g m−3]; CDOM absorption at 440 nm: R2 ≥ 0.67, RMSE ≤1.7 [m−1]). Next, the plausibility of the spatial variation of retrieved WCCs over the study area was evaluated by generating maps of Chla [mg m−3], SPM [g m−3], and CDOM absorption at 440 nm [m−1] from MERIS and OLCI images using the MOD2SEA model. The integration of the spatio-temporal WCC data obtained from in-situ measurements and satellite images in this study finds applications for the detection of anomaly events and serves as a warning for management actions in the complex coastal waters of the Wadden Sea

Energy is critical to all aspects of human development. Modern life is possible only because of the opportunities afforded by modern energy systems. From cooking, to lighting and heating, to transport, access to energy is critical. Governments around the world recognise the linkage between human development and access to safe, secure, and affordable sources of energy. However, many people around the world have access to only rudimentary and inadequate energy sources, depriving them of opportunities for economic development and creating serious health risks. Even in countries in which access to energy services is adequate, the provision of those services has both health and environmental effects. In particular, the production of energy using fossil fuels generates greenhouse gases that contribute significantly to climate disruption, which is likely to create disproportionate risks to the very undeveloped nations already suffering from a lack of access to adequate energy supplies. This chapter presents a framework for understanding these energy challenges in the context of sustainable development. It argues that there are three important ways in which energy is related to sustainable development: a) energy as a necessity for meeting basic human needs energy; b) as a source of environmental stress; and c) energy as a key driver of macroeconomic growth. These three dimensions correspond to the three dimensions of the oft-cited sustainable development tripod: environmental, economic, and social. Using this conceptual framework, the chapter discusses how international law deals with the challenges of energy access in sustainable development and how it ultimately guides decision-making in energy investments. The basic goals of international energy policy are well suited to delivering sustainable energy outcomes by balancing the three elements of sustainable development. However, for this to be achieved, it is necessary to articulate and deploy a legal framework that is capable of guiding disparate energy investments and innovations along a sustainable pathway. An overarching theme that emerges from this analysis is that a robust framework on energy for development must have at its centre, a human rights and sustainable development focus.