African Citizenship Aspirations
African Citizenship Aspirations

Author: Catarina Antunes Gomes

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-12-07

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1351265628

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This collective work aims to critically reflect upon contemporary citizenship aspirations and practices in sub-Saharan Africa. Focusing on different realities, such as Angola, Mozambique and the Great Lakes region, it tries to unveil multiple historical commonalities, especially those arising from shared experiences of postcolonial violence and vulnerability. Thus, albeit the social realities under scrutiny cannot stand for the complexity of the Continent, the studies here gathered enlighten similar processes that can be identified in many other African contexts. That is certainly the case of the proliferation of religious manifestations and democratic demands that are currently being articulated in different countries such as Burundi, Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda and Nigeria. One such commonality can be referred to as a quest for being. Indeed, this quest for being has always underpinned African discourses and practices, either in postcolonial approaches, either in intellectual traditions, either in popular productions. These multiple practices reveal how, in certain circumstances, identity, as a product of historical wills of knowledge, power and truth, can be questioned as a site of possession and entrapment. How is one to be beyond colonial possession? Or beyond postcolonial authoritarian rule? Or beyond eurocentrism? African quests for being have always been quests for freedom. And they impose a debate on regimes of citizenship. Active citizenship is not merely a by-product of formal political systems; it is one that challenges them from the outside while actualizing the lessons of historical liberation struggles. As times goes by, the right to be still stands. The chapters of this book were originally published as a special issue in Citizenship Studies.

Contingent Citizens
Contingent Citizens

Author: Elizabeth Hull

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-10-05

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 1350027774

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Contingent Citizens examines the ambiguous state of South Africa's public sector workers and the implications for contemporary understandings of citizenship. It takes us inside an ethnography of the professional ethic of nurses in a rural hospital in KwaZulu-Natal, shaped by a deep history of mission medicine and changing forms of new public management. Liberal democratic principles of 'transparency', 'decentralization' and 'rights', though promising freedom from control, often generate fear and insecurity instead. But despite the pressures they face, Elizabeth Hull shows that nurses draw on a range of practices from international migration to new religious movements, to assert new forms of citizenship. Focusing an anthropological lens on 'professionalism', Hull explores the major fault lines of South Africa's fragmented social landscape – class, gender, race, and religion – to make an important contribution to the study of class formation and citizenship. This prize-winning monograph will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, development studies, sociology and global public health.

Citizenship Law in Africa
Citizenship Law in Africa

Author: Bronwen Manby

Publisher: African Minds

Published: 2012-07-27

Total Pages: 121

ISBN-13: 1936133296

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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.

Africa and the Sustainable Development Goals
Africa and the Sustainable Development Goals

Author: Maano Ramutsindela

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-06-13

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 3030148572

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The book draws upon the expertise and international research collaborations forged by the Worldwide Universities Network Global Africa Group to critically engage with the intersection, in theory and practice, of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Africa’s development agendas and needs. Further, it argues that – and demonstrates how – the SDGs should be understood as an aspirational blueprint for development with multiple meanings that are situated in dynamic and contested terrains. As the SDGs have substantial implications for development policy and resourcing at both the macro and micro levels, their relevance is not only context-specific but should also be assessed in terms of the aspirations and needs of ordinary citizens across the continent. Drawing on analyses and evidence from both the natural and social sciences, the book demonstrates that progress towards the SDGs must meet demands for improving human well-being under diverse and challenging socio-economic, political and environmental conditions. Examples include those from the mining industry, public health, employment and the media. In closing, it highlights how international collaboration in the form of research networks can enhance the production of critical knowledge on and engagement with the SDGs in Africa.

The Asian Aspiration
The Asian Aspiration

Author: Greg Mills

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-10-15

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1787385078

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In 1960, the GDP per capita of Southeast Asian countries was nearly half of that of Africa. By 1986 the gap had closed and today the trend is reversed, with more than half of the world's poorest now living in sub Saharan Africa. Why has Asia developed while Africa lagged? The Asian Aspiration chronicles the stories of explosive growth and changing fortunes: the leaders, events and policy choices that lifted a billion people out of abject poverty within a single generation, the largest such shift in human history. The relevance of Asia's example comes as Africa is facing a population boom, which can either lead to crisis or prosperity, and as Asia is again transforming, this time out of low-cost manufacturing into hi-tech, leaving a void that is Africa's for the taking. Far from the optimistic determinism of "Africa Rising," this book calls for unprecedented pragmatism in the pursuit of African success.

Pan-Africanism, and the Politics of African Citizenship and Identity
Pan-Africanism, and the Politics of African Citizenship and Identity

Author: Toyin Falola

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-08

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1135005184

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There is no recent literature that underscores the transition from Pan-Africanism to Diaspora discourse. This book examines the gradual shift and four major transformations in the study of Pan-Africanism. It offers an "academic post-mortem" that seeks to gauge the extent to which Pan-Africanism overlaps with the study of the African Diaspora and reverse migrations; how Diaspora studies has penetrated various disciplines while Pan-Africanism is located on the periphery of the field. The book argues that the gradual shift from Pan-African discourses has created a new pathway for engaging Pan-African ideology from academic and social perspectives. Also, the book raises questions about the recent political waves that have swept across North Africa and their implications to the study of twenty-first century Pan-African solidarity on the African continent. The ways in which African institutions are attracting and mobilizing returnees and Pan-Africanists with incentives as dual-citizenship for diasporans to support reforms in Africa offers a new alternative approach for exploring Pan-African ideology in the twenty-first century. Returnees are also using these incentives to gain economic and cultural advantage. The book will appeal to policy makers, government institutions, research libraries, undergraduate and graduate students, and scholars from many different disciplines.

African Democratic Citizenship Education Revisited
African Democratic Citizenship Education Revisited

Author: Yusef Waghid

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-11-28

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 3319678612

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This edited collection explores how democratic citizenship education manifests across the African continent. A recognition of rights and responsibilities coupled with an emphasis on deliberative engagement among citizens, while not uniquely African, provides ample evidence that the concept can most appropriately be realised in relation to its connectedness with experiences of people living on the continent. Focussing on a diverse collection of voices, the editors and authors examine countries that have an overwhelming allegiance to democratic citizenship education. In doing so, they acknowledge that this concept, enveloped by a certain Africanness, has the potential to manifest in practices across the African continent. By highlighting the success of democratic citizenship education, the diverse and varied contributions from across this vast continent address the malaise in its implementation in countries where autocratic rule prevails. This pioneering volume will be an invaluable resource for researchers and students working in the fields of education and sociology, particularly those with an interest in education policy, philosophy of education and global citizenship initiatives.

Black Youth Aspirations
Black Youth Aspirations

Author: Botshabelo Maja

Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing

Published: 2021-11-10

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1802620257

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This book is about how to trigger the capacity to aspire among black youth. Examining the transition out of adulthood and imagined futures of black youth, Maja helps us understand how black youth aspirations might be raised, and how a better future for young people can be achieved.

Working the System
Working the System

Author: Jon Schubert

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2017-11-15

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 1501712330

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Working the System offers key insights into the politics of the everyday in twenty-first-century dominant party and neo-authoritarian regimes in Africa and elsewhere. Detailing the many ways ordinary Angolans fashion their relationships with the system—an emic notion of their current political and socioeconomic environment—Jon Schubert explores what it means and how it feels to be part of the contemporary Angolan polity. Schubert finds that for many ordinary Angolans, the benefits of the post-conflict "New Angola," flush with oil wealth and in the midst of a construction boom, are few. The majority of the inhabitants of the capital, Luanda, struggle to make ends meet and live on under $2.00 per day. The "New Angola" as promoted by the ruling MPLA, Schubert contends, is an essentially urban, upwardly mobile, and aspirational project, premised on the acceptance of the regime’s political and economic dominance by its citizens. In the first ethnography of Angola to be published since the end of that country’s twenty-seven years of intermittent violent internal conflict in 2002, Schubert traces how Angolans may question and resist the system within an atmosphere of apparent compliance. Working the System will appeal to anthropologists and political scientists, urban sociologists, and scholars of African studies.