Paul Nugent

Francesca Locatelli

Contemporary Africa is undergoing a period of unprecedented urban expansion, which is throwing up new challenges in the provision of essential services and contentious questions about ownership of urban spaces. This volume explores the interconnections between these processes, whilst avoiding the tendency to forget that cities are also embedded in deeper historical processes that are integral to the framing of entitlements. Histories of migrancy and the creation of urban 'stranger' communities are fundamental in deciding who lives where and what this means, materially and socially. The gated communities that are springing up are often layered across older forms of urban segregation and/or segmentation. Urban water and food supply, the management of urban land claims, inequality and popular culture are closely examined.

Competing Claims on Urban Spaces

African Cities

Ulf Engel

Space has been reintroduced as an analytical category to the humanities and social sciences in the early 1990s. African Studies is one of the fields of knowledge production where the so-called spatial turn has proved to be extremely fruitful. The continent provides ample evidence for complex processes of deterritorialisation (migration, globalisation, sub-nationalisms) and reterritorialisation (new regionalisms, processes of bordering, etc.). These dialectical processes are driven by a variety of actors: political elites, multinational companies, warlords, donor governments, local traders, international NGOs, etc. As a result substantial parts of Africa witness the emergence of new regimes of territoriality: re-ordered states, transnational and sub-national entities, new localities and transborder formations. This volume brings together contributions from anthropology, history, geography and political science.

Respacing Africa

By examining three centuries of history, this book shows how vital border regions have been in shaping states and social contracts.

The Centrality of the Margins

Boundaries, Communities and State-Making in West Africa

The first integrated history of the Ghana-Togo borderlands.

The Life of the Borderlands Since 1914

Smugglers, Secessionists & Loyal Citizens on the Ghana-Toga Frontier

Hana Horáková

In Africa, the distribution of power and powerlessness seems to be more rigid than on other continents. Political power is in the hands of narrow elites, while the overwhelming majority has hardly any access to decision-making. The common denominator of this book is the notion of power. It follows the analytical differentiation between the concept of power over that which is largely used by mainstream political science, and the concept of power as social practice. The book asks pertinent questions on how power is composed, created, and used on the African continent. (Series: Afrikanische Studien/African Studies - Vol. 43)

Paul Nugent

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