Publications

Ibn Khaldūn’s The Requirements of the Sufi Path, expertly translated by Carolyn Baugh, is not just a scholarly exploration of Sufism; it is a bridge between the mystical and the legal, a rare fusion of juristic precision and spiritual insight. In this work, Khaldūn steps into the role of a jurist to defend the Sufi tradition, weaving together the wisdom of Sufi masters like Imam al-Ghazālī andImam al-Qushayrī with his own legal acumen. What emerges is a compelling argument for the necessity of spiritual guidance, framed within the rigorous structure of Islamic law. This book, brought to life through Baugh’s careful translation, is not merely a historical artefact but a living dialogue between the heart’s mystical yearnings and the mind’s demand for order, a conversation as relevant today as it was in the 14th century. To fully appreciate the significance of this work, we must first understand the intellectual legacy of Ibn Khaldūn, whose contributions to human heritage remain unparalleled. In the following sections, we will explore the life and legacy of IbnKhaldūn, the art of translation that brings his voice to modern readers, and the profound insights this book offers into the Sufi Path.

Child labour remains one of the most persistent human rights challenges in Africa, undermining children’s rights to education, health, and development as enshrined in regional and international human rights instruments. Despite the existence of comprehensive legal frameworks such as the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACRWC) and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Charter), millions of children across the continent continue to be subjected to exploitative and hazardous work. This chapter revisits the role of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) in eradicating child labour in Africa, assessing its effectiveness, limitations, and potential for transformative impact. It critically analyses the ACHPR’s promotional, protective, and interpretative mandates, focusing on its use of state reporting and concluding observations, special mechanisms and collaborations, and communications procedures, to advance children’s rights. The chapter further explores the synergies between the ACHPR and the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACERWC) in addressing systemic violations of children’s rights through joint initiatives and advocacy. The Chapter finds that while the ACHPR has made notable strides in mainstreaming children’s rights into its broader human rights agenda, challenges such as limited enforcement powers, inadequate state compliance, and resource constraints hinder its effectiveness. The chapter concludes that strengthening institutional collaboration, enhancing monitoring mechanisms, and ensuring greater accountability of state parties in addressing root causes are critical to enabling the ACHPR to play a more decisive role in eradicating child labour and upholding children’s rights in Africa.

Households may invest in the human capital development of their children not only for altruistic reasons but also as insurance against future income shocks. Therefore, the allocation of the child's time between school and work is a function of the risk preference of the household head. This paper analyzes the relationship between parental risk preferences and child labor decisions using recall information on child labor and a risk elicitation question. Results reveal that risk‐averse households are more likely to send their children to work. Endogeneity issues are addressed by employing instrumental variables. These results suggest that child labor may be driven by the need to maximize the household's expected income from the child. Regarding heterogeneity, we find that the child labor effect of risk‐aversion is higher for older children. Furthermore, the father's risk‐aversion matters for the probability of child labor, while the intensity of child labor increases with the mother's risk‐aversion. The findings call for an understanding of the behavioral context of the affected households and how risk preferences can affect the success of proposed policies to reduce child labor.

Roots tourism from the United States to African countries is a field within which aspects of tourism, diasporic belonging and migration back to Africa intersect. Destinations such as Ghana invest heavily in campaigns such as the 2019 Year of Return in order to access the African American diaspora market. Since its beginnings in the early 20th century, roots tourism became a significant economic factor for African destinations and involved companies alike. The overall success of this particular variation of diaspora tourism is without a doubt based on the constant and growing interest among African Americans to engage with one’s own historical links to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The wish to overcome this – as Paul Gilroy terms it – shared history of suffering and the longing for reconnecting to the (imagined) motherland Africa became the pillars of success for roots tourism. But this also led to a situation where the destinations got locked in a mode of making a narrative of home accessible to touristic consumption based on the marketing of the cruelty of slavery. Ghana’s 2019 Year of Return indicates an important change in this regard. The central strategies and narratives of the campaign point to a shift away from such highly politicised images of heritage and belonging towards a more event-oriented performance of cosmopolitan Africanness. This could become a crucial factor for the continuation of the success story of roots tourism across the Atlantic.

The increasing frequency of droughts in southern Africa is placing pressure on resource-dependent populations and constraining their ability to build resilience. This study investigates how rural communities in Bushbuckridge, Mpumalanga, South Africa, perceive and respond to El Niño-induced droughts. Using a mixed-methods approach, including surveys and interviews, this research examines household awareness, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity, as well as the factors shaping these dimensions. The findings show that households with greater climate awareness better recognize the potential impacts of El Niño-related drought on agriculture, livestock, and the local economy. Households with members engaged in local non-farm activities or migrant labor displayed higher adaptive capacity but also greater vulnerability in terms of sensitivity, as reliance on external income often reduced on-farm labor and adaptation efforts. Social networks emerged as both an asset, facilitating the spread of adaptation information, and a liability, sometimes reinforcing misinformation and delaying the uptake of science-based strategies. Gender dynamics also influenced adaptive capacity, with male-headed households generally having more resources and labor to implement adaptation measures. These findings highlight that resilience is not solely determined by material resources but emerges from the interaction of awareness, livelihood diversification, social relations, and gendered access to assets. The study underscores the need for resilience initiatives that strengthen local extension services, improve risk communication, and engage social networks while addressing gendered constraints, in order to support timely, informed, and equitable drought adaptation in rural communities.

The Namibian Swakara industry, a type of sheep farming focused on the production of lamb pelts for the fashion industry, currently faces a crisis situation. Formerly one of the most important export products from Namibia, a combination of drought, falling pelt prices and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic now threaten the survival of Swakara, the Namibian Karakul. The current crisis is articulated in extinction narratives. The potential end of Swakara farming as a way of life and a set of knowledge practices is narratively interwoven with the potential disappearance of Swakara from the Namibian landscape. Extinction narratives in the context of Swakara farming in Namibia blur the lines of human and nonhuman ways of life and their disappearance.

Free school meals can be a transformative social policy instrument, especially in the Global South. Domestically sourced school feeding programs can improve children’s food security, augment household incomes, incentivize school attendance, and support local agricultural production. Scholars have so far paid only limited attention to the political causes and processes behind school feeding programs. To contribute to a better understanding of school food politics in Africa, we study the development of two national school feeding programs in Nigeria. We reconstruct and compare the development of the Obasanjo administration’s Home-Grown School Feeding and Health Programme, implemented from 2005 to 2008, and the Buhari administration’s National Home-Grown School Feeding Programme, implemented from 2016 to 2023. We argue that the relatively more successful implementation of the Buhari-era program was the result of a presidential ideology that was more supportive of social policy expansion, a policy design that was more conducive to state-level program implementation, and supportive technical assistance from the London-based Partnership for Child Development.

Compulsory schooling has become a social good that is so much taken for granted that it is hardly criticized anymore. Due to the prevalence of this norm, the paradoxical effects of its global implementation are often overlooked. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Hamar District, southwest Ethiopia, this paper analyses why ‘schooling for all’ that is supposed to bring development and a better life is violently contested among agro-pastoralists in Hamar. Along with the expansion of ‘Western’-style schooling, school-educated youth unemployment is increasing, and the attempt to implement compulsory schooling has created a violent conflict in Hamar District. Following the lives of first-generation schoolchildren from agro-pastoral families, this article shows how schoolchildren become intermediaries between their agro-pastoral kin and the Ethiopian government. Both groups use children and education in struggling over power and change, which creates dilemmas for school-educated youths who are related to both groups and have to navigate these political tensions throughout their life courses. The violent conflict over the implementation of compulsory schooling in Hamar District shows how schooling can turn not only into a metaphorical arena but into a literal battlefield, in which the relations between agropastoralists, the state and (inter)national development are negotiated. Various actors claim competing rights to decide about young people’s education and schooling, but young people are also taking their own decisions about their lives. These educational decisions about learning in and outside school shape wider social, political and economic processes. The increasing number of schoolchildren from agro-pastoralist families blurs the boundaries between agro-pastoralists and the central government, making it fruitful to integrate the study of schooling into research on infrastructure and politics in order to understand processes of rural transformations and conflicts. Young people mediate multiple and at times antagonistic visions of future livelihoods and corresponding forms of education, which creates dilemmas and conflicts throughout their life courses that need to be taken into account in developing sustainable ways of education beyond schooling.

Centrality measurements are a well-known method to assess the importance of actors in networks. They are easy to obtain and provide a versatile interpretability adaptable to the meaning of nodes and edges. The current centrality measurements use structural information alone. In real-world situations, however, actors and the connections between them are subject to contextual settings and can be significantly influenced by these settings. In fact, such real-world observations are often modeled using attributed networks in which contextual information can be associated as attributes to nodes and edges. However, this information is disregarded when evaluating the importance of actors in terms of network centrality measurements. Hence, this paper proposes a method for obtaining shortest path-based centrality measurements for attributed networks that exploit attribute information on nodes for shortest path calculations. We add abstracts of scientific publications to a co-publishing network and use topic models to create node-individual context constraints for shortest path calculations. This creates additional analytic opportunities and can aid in gaining a detailed understanding of complex social networks.

Taking an anthropological perspective of the life course, this article contributes to debates on why women’s engagement in politics is so low in West Africa, with special attention to the Republic of Benin. It argues that women’s political engagement must be understood as deeply entangled with their multiple relations, especially their positioning in roles related to gender and the life course. Given that they must balance their engagement with husbands, children, parents, friends, and siblings through different life stages, their willingness to enter politics may change over time. As they experience and describe politics as a dirty and dangerous space, they often seek to protect themselves and their kin. At the same time, their presence in politics confirms deepening inequalities and class-building processes.

Child labour is a critical issue in artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The case of Kolwezi in Lualaba is of interest because the area is known as the capital of cobalt, a strategic mineral for the transition to a low-carbon economy. Since 2017, global demand for cobalt has been soaring and this raises the question of working conditions in the ASM. This paper attempts to provide a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of child labour in artisanal cobalt mining. The objective is to analyse the political and socio-economic drives of child labour in Kolwezi. By drawing on the current state of the literature and reports on child labour in the mines, as well as field survey, we investigate the social, political, and economic causes of child labour. Results suggest that children's involvement in the artisanal labour market is caused by poverty status, parental conceptions, income inequalities and market imperfections. The implication is that a holistic approach is required to effectively address the problem of child labour. Such an approach must consider both the situation of the child and the household where child labour occurs. The study emphasizes the importance of sensitization of parents and a holistic approach in all initiatives to eradicate child labour in ASM.

Although the Covid-19 disaster predicted for Africa in March 2020 did not occur and, on the contrary, sub-Saharan Africa has remained until today less affected than the rest of the world (if statistics are anything to go by), countries such as Côte d’Ivoire and Cameroon have nevertheless been affected by Covid-19 to varying degrees. From the beginning, their governments took drastic measures to curb the spread of the pandemic. These included the state of health emergency, confinement, curfews, school closures, compulsory mask-wearing, and others. Although these measures were not always adjusted to local realities, the infection rate in both countries remains relatively low. Moreover, the small number of cases on the one hand, and the contradictory positions taken by supposedly knowledgeable personalities as well as the controversies over possible treatments on the other hand, have ended up creating confusion, doubt, and distrust within the populations who find their reflections in the discourse on Covid-19.

In light of global dynamics threatening the social ties that hold societies together, recent research has turned to exploring 'conceptions of social cohesion' in Africa. Focusing on Rwanda, this paper argues that while post-genocide government documents (1999-2012) align with globalized definitions of cohesion—emphasizing inclusive identity, trust, and cooperation—Rwanda's approach to rebuilding national unity is deeply rooted in localized notions. Rwandan notions of social cohesion revolve around 'culture' and 'kinship,' which throughout history have played a crucial role in (re)framing social orders in response to inter-group conflict and shifting conceptions of the nation. This case study suggests that beyond trust in institutions and fellow citizens, understanding the normative narratives and cultural frameworks that define social order, as well as the population's familiarity with these, is crucial to assessing cohesion—especially in contexts of nation-building where social trust has been eroded by violent conflict.

Afro-Latin American lifeworlds are shaped by persistent processes of de- and reterritorialization. Theorizing on these dynamics sheds light on underlying forces of exclusion and discrimination that need to be understood in order to overcome them. This paper presents the results of a grounded theory building process carried out in Salvador da Bahia (Brazil) and Cartagena de Indias (Colombia) throughout six years. Comparing these former ports of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans, I propose a socio-moral cartography that illustrates the tacit dimension of Afrodiasporic (re-)existence. Extensive ethnographic fieldwork, qualitative interviews and participatory action research with artistic groups from Afrodescendant communities allowed scrutinizing the traumatic structures that lie behind both cityscapes. As a result, I present a theory of social delta formation that draws on the conceptual analogy of a river mouth extending into the sea, grounded on the fact that the communities involved in the co-creation of knowledges historically built their neighborhoods by territorializing parts of the Atlantic shore with debris. This socio-moral cartography depicts opportunities for social transformation as well as restrictions due to racist exclusion, disclosing ethics and aesthetics that permeate daily life in (post)colonial and (post)enslavement cityscapes. The theory of social delta formation is applicable both in academic and community settings, as it highlights the broader social, moral and territorial impact of the coloniality of power. It can be extrapolated to many contexts where Afrodescendant people are structurally marginalized and displaced, reinventing their existence every day.

This chapter focuses on the social mobility of the middle class as a widely overlooked reality of African middle classes. With that, I would like to draw attention to the dynamics of social rise and fall and argue that middle class status may be short-lived for many. There is indeed visible social rise of this class, but on the flip side there is rapid social descent in the absence or dysfunctionality of governmental social support systems. This aspect needs to be considered when conceptualising the middle class in an African context as a class that is trying to mitigate uncertainties and eager to prevent social downward mobility.

The aim of this paper is to establish the impact of stereotypes directed at social and ethnic groups in interpersonal interaction in collectivist postcolonial societies. Focus is on the refusal of offers whose acceptance is otherwise supposed to be default. I illustrate using interviews conducted in two Cameroonian towns, Bamenda and Yaounde in 2009, that knowledge of socio-ethnic stereotypes plays a significant role in speakers’ decision to accept or refuse offers from people of certain ethnic background or origin. From a postcolonial pragmatics standpoint, the analysis shows that the desire to enhance in-group cohesion, adhere to societal norms and defend in-group collectivist face while attacking out-group collectivist face is salient in interlocutors’ verbal and physical behaviour.

The term ‘sociology of development’ refers to the existence of a more or less clearly defined sociological sub-discipline which emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. The sociology of development increasingly became a part of the interdisciplinary field of development studies, which for a long time was caught up in the debate on the ‘grand theories’ of modernisation and dependency. Exhausted by this theoretical debate which did not reach a conclusion, sociologists working on the Global South re-invented the sociology of development in the 1980s with an ‘empirical turn’. However, the discussion on postdevelopment started at the same time, and this critical view was later supported by postcolonialism. Sociologists working on the Global South participated in all these debates and quite a few became outspoken critics of the development concept, while others still carry the flag of sociology of development against all odds. This leads to the question whether the sociology of development still exists as a sub-discipline, or whether there are just a few institutional artefacts left, such as sections in sociological associations, which provide a playground for elderly scholars who still live and work in yesterday’s world.