Publications

En el mundo contemporáneo, marcado cada vez más por desigualdades, confinamientos y restricciones de movilidad, nos insta analizar fenómenos relacionados con las fronteras, sean políticas, geográficas, simbólicas, sociales, psicológicas o virtuales, que controlan cuerpos y regulan vidas. Dichos fenómenos se encuentran presentes en las fronteras internas y externas de muchos países latinoamericanos. En esta ponencia nos referiremos a situar algunos proyectos que se nutren y retroalimentan de diversos discursos, acciones y posibilidades simbólicas, en zonas intersticiales (de espacio y tiempo) caracterizadas por oposiciones antonímicas, como centro/periferia, superioridad/inferioridad o riqueza/pobreza. Estos proyectos se nombran como arte de frontera, comprendiendo como tal, aquél que procura reconocer y replantear cualquier tipo de límite. Se realiza por artistas que enfocan su interés en espacios impregnados de violencia, incomprensión, conflictos, diferencias, resentimientos y malentendidos. Para analizar este acontecer seleccionamos las fronteras nacionales e intraurbanas pertenecientes a las ciudades de Tijuana (México) y Salvador de Bahía (Brasil). Citaremos artivistas que están atentos a los acontecimientos (políticos, territoriales, sociales, culturales, etc.) y comprometidos en evidenciar una visión crítica de las fronteras. Argumentamos que el arte bajo este enfoque, cuestiona circunstancial y performáticamente los bordes visibles e invisibles, para crear intersticios que generen irrupciones, debates y oportunidades. Este debate va adquiriendo importancia y nuevas dimensiones ante la actual crisis global, ya que la pandemia produce impactos diferenciados, que agudizan las desigualdades estructurales y restringen las movilidades en el espacio público. Por lo tanto percibimos que nos encontramos inmersas en nuevos límites, donde el arte de frontera puede coadyuvar a crear intersticios que engendren estrategias de resistencia, subversión e insurrección creativa.

Despite tremendous strides in the legal and institutional protection of human rights in Africa, which has seen the African Union champion the ever-growing framework of treaties and institutions dedicated to human rights protection, many African citizens still suffer the yoke of human rights abuses. In some cases, their situations seem worse than they were before the advent of widespread constitutional protection. Despite the establishment of these extensive legal frameworks, why do human rights violations still persist on a large scale? The chapters in this book address this core question by focusing on three intractable problems of human rights, which are defined by the seeming impossibility of resolving them.

Human Trafficking is one of the most relevant forms of human rights abuse and has its effects on the African continent in several ways. Overseas transit metropoles, slums, and big port cities, as well as rural areas that are hardly accessible for human rights defenders, are the scenes of action for forced prostitution, exploitative child labor, and forced recruitment of young children to non-state armed groups. Nigeria is just one prominent example with an estimated 750,000 to 1 million people forced into begging, prostitution, domestic servitude, armed conflict and labour exploitation.1 Despite existing international agreements to tackle this issue, numerous legislations at domestic levels, and a broad number of aid projects in this area, there are still notable deficits in the prevention and prosecution of human trafficking. These deficits result from insufficient involvement of communities that are particularly vulnerable to human trafficking in creating strategies to combat this issue, bureaucratic hurdles, and insufficient collaborations between state institutions and civil society organizations.2 This collection of essays gives a voice to upcoming African researchers, who portray systemic failures as well as potential solution approaches. Including African voices has two benefits here: On the one hand, it ensures epistemic justice. On the other hand, through this combination of theoretical and practical approaches, these essays better reflect on-ground realities. The collection at hand comprises five excellent essays submitted in response to the essay writing competition 'Your Voice in Tackling Human Trafficking in Africa.' The competition was organized and advertised by the Chair of African Legal Studies at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, a leading institution in the field, and funded by the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence. The competition addressed students, civil society actors, activists, and young researchers from the African Union's member states. The goal was to provide young people from the continent, whose voices are underrepresented in the global discourse on human trafficking, with the opportunity to share their perspectives. Due to their originality, the selected contributions can all enrich the discourse on African human trafficking.

Introducing the special issue on the memorialization of camps in Africa and beyond, this text discusses key questions of memory studies and the global history of encampment. Whatever their purpose, all camps are meant to be exceptional, transitory and temporary. Camps are often connected to contested histories and memorialization efforts by former inmates or others can lead to controversies and struggles over its interpretation. Building on a range of empirical examples from Africa and beyond, dealing with camps ranging from the most coercive to the benevolent and from the beginning of the twentieth century until today, this special issue invites a comparative, globally entangled and actor-centred view on camp memorialization.

We examine the effect of rising temperatures on regional economic development, using annual sub-national data for over 1500 regions in 152 countries between 1990 and 2017. In a panel setting with region- and country-year fixed effects, we find no evidence of a homogeneous or heterogeneous effect of rising temperatures on economic development as measured by regional per capita income. Additionally, we find no non-linear relationship between temperature and economic development. We also employ a long-difference approach that is attuned to exploring the long-run relationship between rising temperatures and regional income. Results indicate that rising temperatures have a negative long-run impact on regional per capita income for a minority of regions located in countries with weak economic, legal and political institutions. Furthermore, these vulnerable regions experience a decline in long-term population and human capital development. The use of alternative regional per capita GDP data from 1950 onwards yields similar empirical results. Our findings suggest that negative economic effects of temperature increase with time, only becoming apparent in the long run for regions in already disadvantaged countries. Thus, country-specific conditions may moderate regional economic vulnerability to future temperature increases due to global climate change.

Unser Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über Themen der Kindheits- und Jugendforschung in Afrika. Im ausgehenden 20. und beginnenden 21. Jahrhundert wandeln sich gesellschaftliche, politische und ökonomische Verhältnisse und damit Aufwachsen, Erziehung und Bildung von Kindern. Trotz aller Vielfalt der Lebensverhältnisse in Afrika, zeigt sich, dass sich die Mehrheit der Jugendlichen derzeit in einer Phase der waithood befindet, in der sie hoffen, ihre Träume eines guten Lebens in einer weithin ungewissen Zukunft zu verwirklichen. Hierbei sind Kindheit und Jugend in Afrika in einem globalen Kontext zu verstehen.

The substantial number of Kiswahili prose works published since the 1990s and the growing interest in their analysis play down some drawbacks that make Kiswahili literature vulnerable. Contrary to the usual celebrations of these texts, this article presents the other side of the coin, which suggests a potential crisis in Kiswahili literature. The article begins with Obi Wali’s plea for African literatures to be written in African languages, before narrowing it down to Kiswahili literature. The article shows that although writers in Kiswahili have between the 1970s and the 1990s qualitatively as well as quantitatively responded to Wali’s call, one needs to critically assess works published since the end of the 1990s and especially since the early 2000s. One needs to reconsider the question posed by Matundura: ‘what ails Kiswahili literature?’ This article explores the following challenges facing Kiswahili literature: authorial (im)posture and the ‘death of the critic’; ‘felicitous borrowings’; the demise of editing and the school book race and writers in Kiswahili; and Western midwives and disconnected readers.