Download or read book Citizenship Belonging and Political Community in Africa written by Emma Hunter and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-15 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Africa, it is often said, is suffering from a crisis of citizenship. At the heart of the contemporary debates this apparent crisis has provoked lie dynamic relations between the present and the past, between political theory and political practice, and between legal categories and lived experience. Yet studies of citizenship in Africa have often tended to foreshorten historical time and privilege the present at the expense of the deeper past. Citizenship, Belonging, and Political Community in Africa provides a critical reflection on citizenship in Africa by bringing together scholars working with very different case studies and with very different understandings of what is meant by citizenship. By bringing historians and social scientists into dialogue within the same volume, it argues that a revised reading of the past can offer powerful new perspectives on the present, in ways that might also indicate new paths for the future. The project collects the works of up-and-coming and established scholars from around the globe. Presenting case studies from such wide-ranging countries as Sudan, Mauritius, South Africa, Côte d’Ivoire, and Ethiopia, the essays delve into the many facets of citizenship and agency as they have been expressed in the colonial and postcolonial eras. In so doing, they engage in exciting ways with the watershed book in the field, Mahmood Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject. Contributors: Samantha Balaton-Chrimes, Frederick Cooper, Solomon M. Gofie, V. Adefemi Isumonah, Cherry Leonardi, John Lonsdale, Eghosa E.Osaghae, Ramola Ramtohul, Aidan Russell, Nicole Ulrich, Chris Vaughan, and Henri-Michel Yéré.
Download or read book Development Dual Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa written by Robtel Neajai Pailey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-07 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on rich oral histories, this is an engaging study of citizenship construction and practice in Liberia, Africa's first black republic.
Download or read book Citizenship in Africa written by Bronwen Manby and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-29 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Citizenship in Africa provides a comprehensive exploration of nationality laws in Africa, placing them in their theoretical and historical context. It offers the first serious attempt to analyse the impact of nationality law on politics and society in different African states from a trans-continental comparative perspective. Taking a four-part approach, Parts I and II set the book within the framework of existing scholarship on citizenship, from both sociological and legal perspectives, and examine the history of nationality laws in Africa from the colonial period to the present day. Part III considers case studies which illustrate the application and misapplication of the law in practice, and the relationship of legal and political developments in each country. Finally, Part IV explores the impact of the law on politics, and its relevance for questions of identity and 'belonging' today, concluding with a set of issues for further research. Ambitious in scope and compelling in analysis, this is an important new work on citizenship in Africa.
Download or read book The Arts of Citizenship in African Cities written by M. Diouf and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-12-16 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Arts of Citizenship in African Cities pushes the frontiers of how we understand cities and citizenship and offers new perspectives on African urbanism. Nuanced ethnographic analyses of life in an array of African cities illuminate the emergent infrastructures and spaces of belonging through which urban lives and politics are being forged.
Download or read book Making Nations Creating Strangers written by Sarah Rich Dorman and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2007 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the instrumental manipulation of citizenship and narrowing definitions of national-belonging which refract political struggles in Zimbabwe, Cote d'Ivoire, Cameroon, Somalia, Tanzania, and South Africa, where conflicts are legitimated through claims of exclusionary nationhood and redefinitions of citizenship.
Download or read book Citizenship in Motion written by Itsuhiro Hazama and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2019-04-22 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropological reflections on citizenship focus on themes such as politics, ethnicity and state management. Present day scholarship on citizenship tends to problematise, unsettle and contest often taken-for- granted conventional connotations and associations of citizenship with imagined culturally bounded political communities of rigidly controlled borders. This book, the result of two years of research conducted by South African and Japanese scholars within the framework of a bilateral project on citizenship in the 21st century, contributes to such ongoing efforts at rethinking citizenship globally, and as informed by experiences in Africa and Japan in particular. Central to the essays in this book is the concept of flexible citizenship, predicated on a recognition of the histories of mobility of people and cultures, and of the shaping and reshaping of places and spaces, and ideas of being and belonging in the process. The book elucidates the contingency of political membership, relationship between everyday practices and political membership, and how citizenship is the mechanism for claiming and denying rights to various political communities. Self requires others to construct itself, a reality that is subject to renegotiation as one continues to encounter others in a world characterised by myriad forms of interconnecting mobilities, both global and local. Citizenship is thus to be understood within a complex of power relationships that include ones formed by laws and economic regimes on a local scale and beyond. Citizenship in Africa, Japan and, indeed, everywhere is best explored productively as lying between the open-ended possibilities and tensions interconnecting the global and local.
Download or read book The Perils of Belonging written by Peter Geschiere and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite being told that we now live in a cosmopolitan world, more and more people have begun to assert their identities in ways that are deeply rooted in the local. These claims of autochthony—meaning “born from the soil”—seek to establish an irrefutable, primordial right to belong and are often employed in politically charged attempts to exclude outsiders. In The Perils of Belonging, Peter Geschiere traces the concept of autochthony back to the classical period and incisively explores the idea in two very different contexts: Cameroon and the Netherlands. In both countries, the momentous economic and political changes following the end of the cold war fostered anxiety over migration. For Cameroonians, the question of who belongs where rises to the fore in political struggles between different tribes, while the Dutch invoke autochthony in fierce debates over the integration of immigrants. This fascinating comparative perspective allows Geschiere to examine the emotional appeal of autochthony—as well as its dubious historical basis—and to shed light on a range of important issues, such as multiculturalism, national citizenship, and migration.
Download or read book Ethnicity Citizenship and State in Eastern Africa written by Aquiline S. J. Tarimo and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2011 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume, from an Africa perspective, examines the relationship between ethnicity and citizenship within the framework of nation-state. Its objective and scope engage relational aspects of political integration, awaken public conscience, and motivate civic engagement. It provides a platform that could be considered prerequisite for political transformation. Such a framework is indispensable not only for challenging the politics of exclusion and marginalization, but also for reconstructing fractured social relationships. The test of its validity and relevancy is not whether it accounts for particular traditions, but whether it provides a framework through which we can comprehend the dynamics of ethnic identities as an avenue for promoting participatory governance and democratic accountability. An interdisciplinary study of this kind brings forth practical and theoretical contributions to the evolving concepts of ethnicity and citizenship.
Download or read book Forging African Communities written by Oliver Bakewell and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-22 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book draws renewed attention to migration into and within Africa, and to the socio-political consequences of these movements. In doing so, it complements vibrant scholarly and political discussions of migrant integration globally with innovative, interdisciplinary perspectives focused on migration within Africa. It sheds new light on how human mobility redefines the meaning of home, community, citizenship and belonging. The authors ask how people’s movements within the continent are forging novel forms of membership while catalysing social change within the communities and countries to which they move and which they have left behind. Original case studies from across Africa question the concepts, actors, and social trajectories dominant in the contemporary literature. Moreover, it speaks to and challenges sociological debates over the nature of migrant integration, debates largely shaped by research in the world’s wealthy regions. The text, in part or as a whole, will appeal to students and scholars of migration, development, urban and rural transformation, African studies and displacement.
Download or read book Youth Citizenship and the Politics of Belonging written by Sharlene Swartz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-10-20 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Around the world today, young people are being called upon to develop civic competence and carry the burden of forging a political future in the midst of impoverishment, exclusion and inequality. In societies that have experienced civil war, military occupation, mass immigration of displaced people or social conflict, the conditions under which young people attempt to build their citizenship are not well understood. Youth Citizenship and the Politics of Belonging contributes to the field of youth citizenship studies by purposively exploring the experiences of young adults in the context of the formation of nationhood and global citizenship. It explores, from the perspective of various countries, the role of social context and schooling in creating young citizens. This collection offers a unique opportunity to hear the voices of young people themselves who, as ‘learner citizens’ within educational institutions, poor communities and refugee camps, amongst other settings, expose the tensions between social inclusion and marginalization. The book considers young people’s contemporary social movements, their activism and their sense of belonging. It looks at understandings of national, political and religious identities, youth rights, and various forms of state, community and sexual violence as well as strategic coping strategies, their reinterpretations of civic messages, and the ways in which anger, resistance and disengagement put youth in a difficult position. This book was originally published as a special issue of Comparative Education.
Download or read book Struggles for Citizenship in Africa written by Bronwen Manby and published by Zed Books Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-04-04 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hundreds of thousands of people living in Africa find themselves non-persons in the only state they have ever known. Because they are not recognised as citizens, they cannot get their children registered at birth or entered in school or university; they cannot access state health services; they cannot obtain travel documents, or employment without a work permit; and if they leave the country they may not be able to return. Most of all, they cannot vote, stand for office, or work for state institutions. Ultimately such policies can lead to economic and political disaster, or even war. The conflicts in both Côte d'Ivoire and the Democratic Republic of Congo have had at their hearts the very right of one part of the national population to share with others on equal terms the rights and duties of citizenship. This book brings together new material from across Africa of the most egregious examples of citizenship discrimination, and makes the case for urgent reform of the law.
Download or read book Identity and Belonging written by Vivian Ojong and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2024-09-20 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Migration and the politics of belonging has become buzzwords in the last quarter of the Twentieth and the first decades of Twenty-first Century. Countries and human beings, the world over are on the move. Government institutions in Africa, Europe and elsewhere are investing billions of their currencies to check migration flows. Those who navigate and crossed the international borders are scrutinized with derogatory terminologies. Taking South Africa as a case study and with the use of an interdisciplinary approach, the authors of this book have carved out yet another new fillip which adds to the budding scholarship. The authors have done justice to the topic. The inescapable attraction of this volume is the erudite verve/vitality, scintillating language and the engaging style which they employ to tell a complex story in a very simple way.” Associate Professor Walter Gam Nkwi, Institute of History, University of Leiden, The Netherlands This book approaches the issues of belonging from several perspectives. Utilising an historical approach and policy review to understand the past and current dynamics of belonging, the book provides a basis for understanding the contemporary picture of belonging and citizenship for African migrants in South Africa. Firstly, the historical development of the discourse of citizenship from the pre-apartheid era in South Africa is discussed, highlighting major shifts in perceptions towards African migrants in South Africa. Secondly, the book analyses access to citizenship and how it has implications for the belonging of African migrants in the country. Utilising ethnographic fieldwork, the book makes use of narratives and experiences of African migrants in selected spaces to gain an understanding of how issues of citizenship have structured their relationship with place and space in their migration destinations. It is a major observation that issues of citizenship and belonging are complex and subject to various processes which bring together both the migrants and host communities. On the side of host communities, it is evident that issues of legality structure access to citizenship, and legality is used as an important tool of inclusion and exclusion of foreign African migrants. The second important aspect is the interaction between migrants and the hosts which brings out a discourse of inclusion and exclusion based on identities and competition over access to resources and space. Citizenship and belonging are therefore not clear-cut processes but create complex situations in terms of theorising and managing the practicalities of migration. These complexities stem from the ambiguous processes of inclusion and exclusion of African migrants in South Africa. The tools which are meant to guarantee management of who belongs and who does not are incapable of functioning properly due to human innovativeness, which results in different forms of access mediated by social networks and other extra-legal means.
Download or read book Citizenship Law in Africa written by Bronwen Manby and published by African Minds. This book was released on 2012-07-27 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few African countries provide for an explicit right to a nationality. Laws and practices governing citizenship leave hundreds of thousands of people in Africa without a country to which they belong. Statelessness and discriminatory citizenship practices underlie and exacerbate tensions in many regions of the continent, according to this report by the Open Society Institute. Citizenship Law in Africa is a comparative study by the Open Society Justice Initiative and Africa Governance Monitoring and Advocacy Project. It describes the often arbitrary, discriminatory, and contradictory citizenship laws that exist from state to state, and recommends ways that African countries can bring their citizenship laws in line with international legal norms. The report covers topics such as citizenship by descent, citizenship by naturalization, gender discrimination in citizenship law, dual citizenship, and the right to identity documents and passports. It describes how stateless Africans are systematically exposed to human rights abuses: they can neither vote nor stand for public office; they cannot enroll their children in school, travel freely, or own property; they cannot work for the government.--Publisher description.
Download or read book Ethnicity Democracy and Citizenship in Africa written by Samantha Balaton-Chrimes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As an ethnic minority the Nubians of Kenya are struggling for equal citizenship by asserting themselves as indigenous and autochthonous to Kibera, one of Nairobi’s most notorious slums. Having settled there after being brought by the British colonial authorities from Sudan as soldiers, this appears a peculiar claim to make. It is a claim that illuminates the hierarchical nature of Kenya’s ethnicised citizenship regime and the multi-faceted nature of citizenship itself. This book explores two kinds of citizenship deficits; those experienced by the Nubians in Kenya and, more centrally, those which represent the limits of citizenship theories. The author argues for an understanding of citizenship as made up of multiple component parts: status, rights and membership, which are often disaggregated through time, across geographic spaces and amongst different people. This departure from a unitary language of citizenship allows a novel analysis of the central role of ethnicity in the recognition of political membership and distribution of political goods in Kenya. Such an analysis generates important insights into the risks and possibilities of a relationship between ethnicity and democracy that is of broad, global relevance.
Download or read book Identification and Citizenship in Africa written by Séverine Awenengo Dalberto and published by Routledge Contemporary Africa. This book was released on 2023-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the context of a global biometric turn, this book investigates processes of legal identification in Africa "from below", asking what this means for the relationship between citizens and the state. Almost half of the population of the African continent was thought to lack a legal identity in 2018, and many states have seen biometric technology as a reliable and efficient solution to the problem. However, this book shows that biometrics, far from securing identities and avoiding fraud or political distrust, can even participate in reinforcing exclusion and polarizing debates on citizenship and national belonging. It highlights the social and political embedding of legal identities and the resilience of the documentary state. Drawing on empirical research conducted across 14 countries, the book documents the processes, practices and meanings of legal identification in Africa from the 1950s right up to the biometric boom. Beyond the classic opposition between surveillance and recognition, it demonstrates how analyzing the social uses of IDs and tools of identification can give a fresh account of the state at work, the practices of citizenship and the role of bureaucracy in the writing of the self in African societies. This book will be of an important reference for students and scholars of African studies, politics, human security and anthropology and the sociology of the state (éditeur).
Download or read book Practices of Citizenship in East Africa written by Katariina Holma and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-04 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Practices of Citizenship in East Africa uses insights from philosophical pragmatism to explore how to strengthen citizenship within developing countries. Using a bottom-up approach, the book investigates the various everyday practices in which citizenship habits are formed and reformulated. In particular, the book reflects on the challenges of implementing the ideals of transformative and critical learning in the attempts to promote active citizenship. Drawing on extensive empirical research from rural Uganda and Tanzania and bringing forward the voices of African researchers and academics, the book highlights the importance of context in defining how habits and practices of citizenship are constructed and understood within communities. The book demonstrates how conceptualizations derived from philosophical pragmatism facilitate identification of the dynamics of incremental change in citizenship. It also provides a definition of learning as reformulation of habits, which helps to understand the difficulties in promoting change. This book will be of interest to scholars within the fields of development, governance, and educational philosophy. Practitioners and policy-makers working on inclusive citizenship and interventions to strengthen civil society will also find the concepts explored in this book useful to their work. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429279171, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license
Download or read book Identity Citizenship and Political Conflict in Africa written by Edmond J. Keller and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflecting on the processes of nation-building and citizenship formation in Africa, Edmond J. Keller believes that although some deep parochial identities have eroded, they have not disappeared and may be more assertive than previously thought, especially in instances of political conflict. Keller reconsiders how national identity has been understood in Africa and presents new approaches to identity politics, intergroup relations, state-society relations, and notions of national citizenship and citizenship rights. Focusing on Nigeria, Ethiopia, Cote d'Ivoire, Kenya, and Rwanda, he lays the foundation for a new understanding of political transition in contemporary Africa.
