This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the evolutionary path of Nigeria's political development. Drawing from the historical themes that existed before and after independence, Kalu N. Kalu elucidates the challenging role of an oil-dependent economy in the struggle for control of state power in the face of political corruption, clientelism, and market failures.
Demonstrating how political culture facilitates or distorts political preferences and political outcomes, this book explores how the historical development of social conditions and the current social structures shape understandings and constrain individual and collective actions within the Nigerian political system. Political Culture, Change, and Security Policy examines the extent to which specific norms and socialization processes within the political and civic culture abet corruption or the proclivity to engage in corrupt practices and how they help reinforce political attitudes and civic norms that have the potential to undermine the effectiveness of government. It also delineates specific doctrinal models and strategic framework essential to the development and implementation of Nigeria’s national security policy, as well as innovative approaches to national development planning. Professor Kalu N. Kalu offers an exhaustive study that integrates several quantitative models in addressing a series of theoretical and empirical questions that inform historical and contemporary issues of the Nigerian project. The general premise is that it is not enough to simply highlight the problems of the state and address the what question, we must also address the why and how questions that drive political change, policy preferences, and competing political outcomes.
Why does religion become a fault line of communal violence in some pluralistic countries and not others? Under what conditions will religious identity - as opposed to other salient ethnic cleavages - become the spark that ignites communal violence? Contemporary world politics since 9/11 is increasingly marked by intra-state communal clashes in which religious identity is the main fault line. Yet, violence erupts only in some religiously pluralistic countries, and only in some parts of those countries. This study argues that prominent theories in the study of civil conflict cannot adequately account for the variation in subnational identity-based violence. Examining this variation in the context of Nigeria's pluralistic north-central region, this book finds support for a new theory of power-sharing. It finds that communities are less likely to fall prey to a divisive narrative of religious difference where local leaders informally agreed to abide by an inclusive, local government power-sharing arrangement.
This book analyses the political and ethnical tensions that characterize Nigeria, which derive both from colonial and contemporary conflicts. It points out three major factors why Nigeria has not yet collapsed like many other African states: ethnic power sharing amongst the political elite, the military with its national outlook, and oil wealth.
The principal aim of this book is to revisit the basic theme of “unity and diversity” that remains at the heart of research into federalism and federation. It is time to take another look at its contemporary relevance to ascertain how far the bifocal relationship between unity and diversity has evolved over the years and has been translated into changing conceptual lenses, practical reform proposals and in some cases new institutional practices. This book is structured around four main parts: (1) the evolving conception of diversity over time and across continents; (2) the interplay between unity and diversity in complex settings; (3) federalism as decision-making and new institutional practices that have been put forward and tested; and (4) constitutional design and asymmetrical federalism as a way to respond to legitimate and insisting claims and political demands.
This book examines the notion that while states may differ in terms of ideology, economic system, and institutional architecture, their role as an organizing framework for system-wide political action and international relations is contingent on a series of competing and oftentimes mutually exclusive factors. This work clarifies factors that contribute to our understanding of the critical roles of systemic and sub-systemic elements of society and how they reinforce the reciprocal problems of human and social organizations, and the institutionalization processes that help to constrain them.
Nigeria is famous for "419" e-mails asking recipients for bank account information and for scandals involving the disappearance of billions of dollars from government coffers. Corruption permeates even minor official interactions, from traffic control to university admissions. In Moral Economies of Corruption Steven Pierce provides a cultural history of the last 150 years of corruption in Nigeria as a case study for considering how corruption plays an important role in the processes of political change in all states. He suggests that corruption is best understood in Nigeria, as well as in all other nations, as a culturally contingent set of political discourses and historically embedded practices. The best solution to combatting Nigerian government corruption, Pierce contends, is not through attempts to prevent officials from diverting public revenue to self-interested ends, but to ask how public ends can be served by accommodating Nigeria's history of patronage as a fundamental political principle.
This accessible volume shines a light on how autocracy really works by providing basic facts about how post-World War II dictatorships achieve, retain, and lose power. The authors present an evidence-based portrait of key features of the authoritarian landscape with newly collected data about 200 dictatorial regimes. They examine the central political processes that shape the policy choices of dictatorships and how they compel reaction from policy makers in the rest of the world. Importantly, this book explains how some dictators concentrate great power in their own hands at the expense of other members of the dictatorial elite. Dictators who can monopolize decision making in their countries cause much of the erratic, warlike behavior that disturbs the rest of the world. By providing a picture of the central processes common to dictatorships, this book puts the experience of specific countries in perspective, leading to an informed understanding of events and the likely outcome of foreign responses to autocracies.
