China Science

This article looks at four cases of youth-led identity-based social movements in Benin City and in the Annang area of southern Nigeria. It shows how each of these movements - youth associations, ‘area boys’, vigilantes and campus cults - draws on different, older repertoires of discourse and organization, and enters into relations with state authority that combine elements of complicity, insurgency, monitoring and disengagement. (more…)

Postcolonial theory is frequently dismissed as too theoretical and esoteric, and hence irrelevant to the study of contemporary African politics and society. This article challenges this dismissal of postcolonialism, and argues for a more constructive dialogue between African studies and postcolonial approaches. (more…)

This article examines the role of British legal scholars and institutions in the development of African law in the period from the end of the Second World War to the 1960s. In particular, it considers the extent to which the new legal scholars broke with the methods and priorities of anthropologists who had studied and developed African law in the colonial period. (more…)

The domestic political situation in South Africa was an issue of concern for US policymakers, and thus for the American intelligence community, from 1948 to 1994. This paper uses recently declassified intelligence assessments of South Africa to evaluate how successful American analysts were in predicting the evolution of apartheid in the uncertain mediumterm. I find that, contrary to much of the literature on US–South Africa relations specifically and American foreign policy more generally, the global superpower struggle (more…)

While the islands of S?o Tomé e Príncipe (STP) were once a leading cocoa producer, cocoa production is now relatively insignificant and the country is little known today outside the lusophone world. But STP could soon gain strategic and economic importance as its territorial waters are suspected to hold large quantities of crude oil. (more…)

Kenya’s return to pluralist politics in the early 1990s saw the eruption of political violence that has since laid siege to human rights and democracy. This article discusses the Mungiki movement which, like the Mau Mau movement that waged armed struggle against the British in the 1950s, has sprouted among the Kikuyu. (more…)

The HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa has far-reaching implications for governance and development. In addition to killing millions of individuals and causing serious economic contractions, the pandemic threatens structural transformations in African economies, institutions and governance. (more…)