Publications

African and African diaspora scholars have made key contributions to contemporary understandings of inequality, intersectionality, institutions and ‘development'. A recent major contribution to this debate is offered by Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s Property, Institutions and Social Stratification in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Drawing on a wide range of literatures, but especially from traditions of Black radical economic thought that span the United States, the Caribbean and Africa, the book calls for intersectional perspectives to be brought to bear on classical institutionalist and stratification economics traditions to rethink ‘development economics’ as we know it. Obeng-Odoom utilizes these traditions to make sense of persistent and increasing intra- and inter-group inequalities in Africa and between Africa and the world, showing how classed, raced and gendered identities shape diverse political and economic experiences, including the access to property or employment opportunities. At the same time, Black wo*men economists and wo*men economists of Colour have made notable contributions to the themes addressed by Obeng-Odoom's book - an archive that deserves deep attention. Gathering a collective of feminist economists from and beyond Africa (Abena D. Oduro, Tanita J. Lewis, Lebohang Liepollo Pheko, Sara Stevano, Ingrid Kvangraven), this symposium paper develops a conversation around the themes of intersectionality and social stratification in Africa.

The Africa Multiple Interactive Research Atlas (AMIRA, https://data.africamultiple.uni-bayreuth.de/) is the public access point for the research (meta)data of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth (Germany). Built on Omeka S by the Cluster's Digital Research Environment (DRE), it brings together nearly 4,000 research items, more than 90 projects, some 1,600 people, and close to 600 organisations across 39 countries and 28 languages. The collections come from the five Africa Multiple Research Centres — University of Bayreuth, University Joseph Ki-Zerbo, University of Lagos, Moi University, and Rhodes University — and their partners. Curation is shared: each centre describes the data it knows best, while Bayreuth maintains a metadata layer that points to data held locally rather than relocating it, following the FAIR and CARE principles. This paper presents AMIRA as a case study in what it means to reimagine a digital collection built on relationality. Rather than discrete records, the atlas foregrounds connections between entities: knowledge graphs linking people, projects, places, and publications; collaboration networks; and "discursive communities" that cluster the subjects co-occurring across the collections. These views are designed to surface discoveries that no single catalogue record makes visible. These ambitions also expose where the work is hardest. An atlas built on relationality depends on metadata that researchers often supply sparingly, subject description most of all: where terms exist, they tend to derive from Library of Congress Subject Headings, a vocabulary often poorly suited to African sources and knowledge systems. Here our thinking is still exploratory: drawing on Wikidata, and creating the African entities and concepts it lacks. Connections and keywords alike raise one question: who holds authority over how knowledge is described, and therefore found. In an era of contested truth, that is what reimagining the archive must confront.

Examining the case of some nineteen thousand Polish refugees in British colonial Africa, this article challenges the Eurocentric historiography of the post–World War II international refugee regime. These Poles, after being hosted by the colonial governments first, eventually came under the mandate of emerging UN refugee organizations that treated Europeans as internationally recognized refugees everywhere in the world. In contrast, fleeing Africans (and Asians) did not fit this category. This distinction had more to do with imperialism and race than with any geographic limitation. Conceptually, the refugee regime rests on the differentiation of refugees and national citizens, while imperial rule differentiated between European citizens and colonized subjects. I want to complicate this by emphasizing that the international refugee regime emerged in a largely imperial world signified by a tripartition into citizen, subject, and European refugee.

In the backdrop of the historical uprooting and the forced deportation of Africans to the Americas, territoriality has become key in analysing practices of Afro-descendant resistance and (re-)existence in the Latin-American diaspora. It is in the re-making and re-imagining of (post)colonial territories that insurgent knowledges are produced, especially in contexts where the legacies of enslavement, marginalisation and invisibilisation are rife. Inspired by the ways in which young artists from Cartagena de Indias (Colombia) and Salvador da Bahia (Brazil) re-invent territoriality through artistic creativity, we developed a Participatory Action Research project that harnesses community mapping, self-writing and performance in an online and on-site exchange programme. In our panel, we launch and discuss a documentary video on this collective process realised in collaboration with the socio-cultural groups Candilé (Cartagena) and REPROTAI (Salvador). In a self-reflexive mode that casts a critical glance at our transdisciplinary co-creation of knowledges, we focus on the challenges, shortcomings as well as opportunities of doing Participatory Action Research in actual and virtual spaces for more than three years. Thereby, we bring into dialogue the perspectives of two project coordinators and two discussants who followed the process with interest, though not actively involved. We consider the participatory exploration of territories and territorialities as a pertinent heuristic prism in examining Afro-diasporic lifeworlds and the practical/symbolic attempts at memorialisation and collective becoming. Through creative media, youth and young adults re-map possibilities of existence that envision more inclusive spaces, using traces of African heritage as building blocks for individual and collective self-actualisation.

Current political sociology scholarship suggests that limited state autonomy from societal organisations undermines state enforcement capacity throughout the national territory, and therefore does superficial separation of the state from civil society (or formal from informal institutions) in the conceptualisation of what effective state system ought to be. These conceptions contradict realities in post-colonial Africa where societal organisations have evolved to bear ‘state-like’ qualities in resource governance, especially in remote locations where the state has no promising alter- native to accommodating inputs from revered institutions or charismatic actors to complement its functions. Colo- nial experiences in Africa have produced institutional pluralism and a consequential split loyalty to the state in the post-independence era. Apparently, limited state autonomy sometimes refract or obstruct state visions; the resultant co-governance regime does not imply ‘wishy-washy’ state leadership. This is because state formation processes have produced an intermeshed governance of people, places, and resources through a complicated interplay between entities which have become indistinct in terms of functions, and hence cannot be simplistically categorised as either formal or informal, state or non-state. In this sense, the activity of regulating affairs in the post-colonial regime is characterised by relational governance – a form of governance sutured via reciprocal relation(s) between multiple actors across dif- ferent spatial scales and milieus. Drawing on an empirical study of biofuel projects in Ghana, we believe a relational governance approach provides an analytic framework to challenge this orthodoxy in governance studies and refresh discussions on the nature of state-society relations required for effective governance of territorial resources in post- colonial regimes characterised by institutional pluralism.

Whereas the multiple entanglements between Africa and its Latin American diasporas can hardly be squeezed into the boundaries established by the academic field, transdisciplinary cooperation between academics and artists offers a fruitful way out of disciplinary bottlenecks. In this roundtable, we will share insights into modalities of relating and translating that enable and restrain transdisciplinary knowledge production. As a first result of the Participatory Action Research programme carried out at the intersection of the Cluster projects “Moral Geographies of Re-Existence” and “Black Atlantic Revisited”, we will launch a video performance created by the artists Diego Araúja (Brazil), Lobadys Pérez (Colombia) and Matchume Zango (Mozambique). Taking a cue from the transdisciplinary video, we will jointly reflect on processes, products and pitfalls of border-crossing knowledge creation. In this vein, we aim at stimulating debates on innovative modes of doing research in ways that enhance in-depth and multi-perspectival analyses. Our contribution adds to discussions on knowledge transfer and dissemination with a view to widening the audience and raising the social impact of social sciences, humanities and the arts. Ultimately, multiple relations between Africa and its diasporas require multiple modes of knowledge production, reflection and diffusion in order to overcome historical and disciplinary strictures.

Current debates in urban studies are critically questioning the theoretical and empirical adequacy of the concept city. For urban research, European and North-American contexts are equally insufficient points of reference as is the Global South, and the delimitation of expanding, interwoven and hyper-connected agglomerations seems increasingly arbitrary. Established regionalisations of urban areas or cities are thus fading away in more than one sense, demanding for conceptual and methodological consequences. Based on an analysis of the related debates, this paper stresses the relevance of the societal respectively socio-spatial dimension of urbanity. The need to contextualize this dimension finds its expression in the term global urban society. Finally, this perspective is transformed into a preliminary research programme centered on a conceptual and empirical investigation towards a relational urbanity.

In Ländern der majority world (Dasen & Akkari, 2008) sind aufgrund massiver Eingriffe durch Kolonialisierungsprozesse Bildungssysteme entstanden, denen andere sozio-ökonomische Figurationen zugrunde liegen als in der minority world. Die großen Erwartungen in die Möglichkeiten des sozialen Aufstiegs durch Bildung werden nur sehr selten erfüllt. Trotz massiver Investitionen in schulische Bildung durch Angehörige werden die Lebenswege und Berufsbiografien vieler junger Menschen maßgeblich durch außerschulische Relationen und Lernräume geprägt. Hier setzt das Projekt Making a living. Learning trajectories towards the ability to earn a livelihood an, innerhalb dessen wir mithilfe von Fallstudien aus dem ländlichen Benin die diversen Figurationen herausarbeiten, in denen junge Menschen ihren Lebensunterhalt verdienen. Dieser Text präsentiert eine dieser Fallstudien und diskutiert zugleich, inwiefern relationale Ansätze besser die spezifischen Bildungskonfigurationen herausarbeiten können als herkömmliche Ansätze. Wir verstehen dies als wichtigen und dekolonialen Beitrag zu Reflexionen des globalen Bildungssektors.

Environmental change is increasingly threatening rural livelihoods across the globe. Yet rural communities possess valuable knowledge that could inform policy decisions on creating sustainable livelihoods amidst global environmental challenges and planning for rural community and landscape sustainability. Against this backdrop, this paper focuses on three key questions in a rural South African setting: What challenges do rural residents face in maintaining and developing livelihoods compared to the past? (ii) What environmental changes have they observed within their communities over their lifetime? and (iii) How are these changes perceived to influence circular migration for work? By examining rural dwellers’ perceptions of the challenges to securing sustainable livelihoods, valuable insights can be gleaned as to why certain strategies succeed while others fail, leading to the identification of areas for improvement in policy, programs and livelihood strategies. This study draws on qualitative data from focus group discussions held across nine villages in the MRC/Wits Agincourt Health and Socio-Demographic Surveillance System site in northeast South Africa. The facilitated focus group discussions allowed participants to reflect on a range of environmental and livelihood issues in relation to the study questions. The findings demonstrate that environmental stressors induced by climate change, pollution, and natural resource degradation are perceived to restrict employment and income opportunities, exacerbate water and food insecurity, and drive circular migration. These findings provide valuable insights for researchers and policymakers in crafting strategies to enhance adaptive capacity and mitigate the vulnerability of rural livelihoods in rural regions across the global South.

The aforementioned trajectory towards the emerging study of men, masculinities, and religion adopts the concept of patriarchy to develop a critical analysis of the ways in which men and masculinities form part of broader structures of gendered power. The main concern is with the inequalities between men and women and with religious ideologies that buttress patriarchal masculinities. The prior discussion has already alluded to various ways in which masculinity has become politicised in contemporary African contexts. Masculinity politics refers to “those mobilisations and struggles where the meaning of masculine gender is at issue, and, with it, men’s position in gender relations. In African contexts, this paradox may be most apparent in Pentecostal-Charismatic Christian movements. For instance, Pentecostal discourses of masculinity clearly are a negotiation of modern gender ideals, but are given legitimacy through a language of “biblical manhood”.

Ce chapitre repense la catégorisation religieuse à partir du cas du Bénin, questionnant l’écart entre les données officielles et les pratiques réelles. Alors que les recensements suggèrent une forte progression des religions monothéistes, l’observation de terrain révèle la persistance des religions endogènes – en particulier le vodunïsme – ainsi que l’hybridation des pratiques chrétiennes et musulmanes. L’analyse retrace les trajectoires historiques des principales traditions religieuses du pays et examine les politiques étatiques récentes qui ont d’abord reconnu, puis patrimonialisé le vodun. Les configurations confessionnelles et les stratégies de laïcité « endogène » ou « positive » y sont envisagées comme des processus dynamiques, reflétant les tensions entre impératifs de modernité et spécificités culturelles. S’appuyant sur des enquêtes de terrain ainsi que sur l’analyse des discours publics et médiatiques, le chapitre propose une approche relationnelle invitant à repenser les paradigmes traditionnels de catégorisation des appartenances religieuses.

Dysfunctionality of education – or to be more precise time spent in institutions meant to be installed for the purpose of education – is a problem that attracts attention globally. Apparently reports and studies show that in many contexts, not only due to bad conditions such as lack of facilities, absence of teachers (Abadzi 2009; De and Dreze 1999; De et al. 2011) etc., but also because of the inadequate form and content of education, children leave school after years of boredom and helpless disciplinary actions without the ability to read, write and/or be able to contribute a meaningful share to their community (Jeffrey et. al. 2004, 2005; Pillai 2013). Contrary, the socialisation in these institutions can alienate the young community members from their community and leave them without any competencies, be it for subsistence economy on the one hand or white-collar employment in global economy on the other (ibid.). Beside this urgent need for transformations in the given educational sector, it seems to be very difficult if not impossible to even think of alternative forms of education that are substantially different to the hegemonic concept of education found globally. In the following pages, we analyse more detailed the underlying concept of universal education and why thinking of alternative ways in education is so difficult, but urgent. Our assumption is that the very idea of singularity is part of the problem.

In early 2025, increasing numbers of women held positions of formal political power across West Africa. In Ghana, Professor Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang had just been elected vice-president, and in Benin, Mariam Chabi Talata had been vice-president since 2021 (see Alber, this volume). Cabo Verde and Senegal had more than 40 percent women in their national parliaments, and in early 2024, Sierra Leone, Togo, and Cabo Verde had 30 percent or more women serving as cabinet ministers. While at least the tendency of growing numbers sounds promising, countries in East and southern Africa have experienced much higher rates of women in positions of political leadership for many years. Rwanda has led the world in women’s representation in parliament, with more than 50 percent women for two decades, and South Africa and Mozambique have had gender-parity cabinets for many years.1 Most West African countries are still far away from such high representation of women in parliaments, and yet formal political power in institutions such as parliaments and cabinets is only one of the ways in which women use political power to influence the world around them. Women have for centuries used their everyday power, knowledge, and competencies to shape West African politics and society, in formal as well as informal positions and settings (Amoah-Boampong and Agyeiwaa 2021). They have acted as monarchs, merchant queens, pharaohs, queen mothers, and spiritual and religious leaders (Achebe 2020). In so doing, they have defended their interests and those of the people around them, all the while contributing to significant social and political change. Much more recently, after the end of conflicts and military rule in some countries in the region, transitions to democracy have enabled some women to exercise more political power informally. Democratization in Africa has opened up more axes of power by making the state more susceptible to pressure from civil society, as in the media and by traditional [End Page 1] authorities and religious and occupational associations (Waylen 2010).2 Because democratization was accompanied by pressures from outside states and global actors to liberalize economies, some of those interests in civil society were powerful economic actors and enterprises. Thus, democratization opened new pathways and opportunities for women to exercise political power informally, through occupations like trading, or through their gendered roles as mothers and wives. Much of that activity has occurred under the leadership of mobilized local and national women’s organizations and associations (Medie 2016). This special issue, focusing on West Africa, aims to make visible these processes—of the exercise of formal and informal political power, especially by women—and to show how they are related. Combining scholarship on women in formal political office with that on women exercising power in other, more informal ways, we seek to demonstrate a broader understanding of women in West African societies and their multiple, sometimes intersecting, ways of holding and acting out political power. With that, we contribute to the still small literature on elite women on the African continent. We hope this special issue will offer glimpses into historical continuities and ruptures in the complexities of women’s political engagement, inside and outside the formal sphere of politics, as well as indicate avenues for future research. This collection of articles is drawn from presentations made at a workshop of the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA) at the University of Ghana in May 2023. The workshop, which brought together invited scholars from West Africa, Europe, and North America, was organized by a MIASA interdisciplinary fellows’ group, of which the three guest editors were members. The goal of the workshop was to reflect on women’s presence in politics—understood broadly—across West Africa. This overarching theme unites the articles in this special issue, providing readers with a coherent focus but from a rich diversity of narratives.