Sure Road? Nationalisms in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique
Sure Road? Nationalisms in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique

Author: Eric Morier-Genoud

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2012-04-19

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 900422601X

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This book brings together new research on the subject of nations and nationalisms in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. It explores the history and politics of diverse nationalist discourses and ideologies, and it revisits the formation and contemporary developments of national imagined communities in Portuguese-speaking Africa. It does so by drawing on several disciplines and by exploring themes as diverse as Frelimo’s liberation literature, UNITA’s moral economy and the disaggregation of Guinea-Bissau. The authors provide novel insights in the hope of contributing to the academic and public debate on the subject, not least in those countries where, in the face of liberalisation, ruling parties and their opponents have been arguing intensively over, and have sometime struggled to re-invent, a sense of national community. Through their engagement with the subject, authors also make a contribution to the general discussion of the concepts of nations and nationalism.

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.

Magnificent and Beggar Land
Magnificent and Beggar Land

Author: Ricardo Soares de Oliveira

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015-04-02

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 0190251417

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Magnificent and Beggar Land is a powerful account of fast-changing dynamics in Angola, an important African state that is a key exporter of oil and diamonds and a growing power on the continent. Based on three years of research and extensive first-hand knowledge of Angola, it documents the rise of a major economy and its insertion in the international system since it emerged in 2002 from one of Africa's longest and deadliest civil wars. The government, backed by a strategic alliance with China and working hand in glove with hundreds of thousands of expatriates, many from the former colonial power, Portugal, has pursued an ambitious agenda of state-led national reconstruction. This has resulted in double-digit growth in Sub-Saharan Africa's third largest economy and a state budget in excess of total western aid to the entire continent. Scarred by a history of slave trading, colonial plunder and war, Angolans now aspire to the building of a decent society. How has the regime, led by President José Eduardo dos Santos since 1979, dealt with these challenges, and can it deliver on popular expectations? Soares de Oliveira's book charts the remarkable course the country has taken in recent years.

Securing Peace in Angola and Mozambique
Securing Peace in Angola and Mozambique

Author: Miranda Melcher

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-03-21

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1350407925

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This book helps explain how and why there are such diverging outcomes of UN peace negotiations and treaties through a detailed examination of peace processes in the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Does it really matter what's written on page 36, protocol V, section III, point 5 of a UN-endorsed peace treaty? Dr. Miranda Ruwart Melcher shows that seemingly small details - such as who wears suits, who has toothbrushes, and how specific words are translated between French and English - can and have delayed peace or contributed to restarting wars. Dr. Melcher uses unique primary source data, including interviews with key actors who have participated in peace treaty negotiations, as well as thousands of previously newly opened UN documents. She argues that treaty specificity is an undervalued - but important - factor in researching the success or failure of peace processes. The book offers new insights and policy recommendations for key details whose presence or absence can have a significant impact on how peace processes unfold.

Imperial Migrations
Imperial Migrations

Author: E. Morier-Genoud

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2012-12-15

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 1137265000

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This volume investigates what role colonial communities and diaspora have had in shaping the Portuguese empire and its heritage, exploring topics such as Portuguese migration to Africa, the Ismaili and the Swiss presence in Mozambique, the Goanese in East Africa, the Chinese in Brazil, and the history of the African presence in Portugal.

Women’s Lived Landscapes of War and Liberation in Mozambique
Women’s Lived Landscapes of War and Liberation in Mozambique

Author: Jonna Katto

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-11-11

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1000701158

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This book tells the history of the changing gendered landscapes of northern Mozambique from the perspective of women who fought in the armed struggle for national independence, diverting from the often-told narrative of women in nationalist wars that emphasizes a linear plot of liberation. Taking a novel approach in focusing on the body, senses, and landscape, Jonna Katto, through a study of the women ex-combatants’ lived landscapes, shows how their life trajectories unfold as nonlinear spatial histories. This brings into focus the women’s shifting and multilayered negotiations for personal space and belonging. This book explores the life memories of the now aging female ex-combatants in the province of Niassa in northern Mozambique, looking at how the female ex-combatants’ experiences of living in these northern landscapes have shaped their sense of socio-spatial belonging and attachment. It builds on the premise that individual embodied memory cannot be separated from social memory; personal lives are culturally shaped. Thus, the book does not only tell the history of a small and rather unique group of women but also speaks about wider cultural histories of body-landscape relations in northern Mozambique and especially changes in those relations. Enriching our understanding of the gendered history of the liberation struggle in Mozambique and informing broader discussions on gender and nationalism, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of African history, especially the colonial and postcolonial history of Lusophone Africa, as well as gender/women’s history and peace and conflict studies.

Cinemas of the Mozambican Revolution
Cinemas of the Mozambican Revolution

Author: Ros Gray

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 184701237X

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A timely analysis that provides a pre-history to current debates on decolonisation, the politics of the moving image, and artistic engagements with anti-colonial archives.

Identity and Religion in Peace Processes
Identity and Religion in Peace Processes

Author: Karina V. Korostelina

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-08-01

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 1040105858

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This book examines the complex role identity and religion play in global peace processes. Based on multiple case studies, this book unveils the complex role identity and religion play in peace processes across the globe. It demonstrates that the success and sustainability of a peace process depends on the systemic application of the BRIDGE model that is introduced here. This model describes five major strategies (Bonding, Reassuring, Involving, Determining Guides, and Equalizing) and numerous tactics for how peace processes and accords can deal with the central issues as well as important common challenges that run through identity-based ethnonational or religious conflicts. This represents the first comprehensive account of how the transition from enemies to neighbors is achieved and how intergroup relations and engagement are transformed in peace processes, impacting power, access to resources, legitimacy, and representation in national identity. The model also discusses what forms of peacebuilding authentically represent the interests, needs, and values of religious constituencies, and what can be learned from how religious constituencies escalate and de-escalate conflict. The book demonstrates why religion must also be included in peace processes and permanent solutions, owing to religion’s capacity to enhance commitment to bonding and peaceful values, such as justice, compassion, nonviolence, stability, care for children, and care for the environment, for the sick, the wounded, the traumatized, and the bereaved. This book will be of much interest to students of peace studies, intra-state conflict, religion studies, and International Relations.

Political Identity and Conflict in Central Angola, 1975-2002
Political Identity and Conflict in Central Angola, 1975-2002

Author: Justin Pearce

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-07-02

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1107079640

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This book examines the internal politics of the war that divided Angola for more than a quarter-century after independence. In contrast to earlier studies, its emphasis is on Angolan people's relationship to the rival political forces that prevented the development of a united nation. Pearce's argument is based on original interviews with farmers and town dwellers, soldiers and politicians in Central Angola. He uses these to examine the ideologies about nation and state that elites deployed in pursuit of hegemony, and traces how people responded to these efforts at politicisation. The material presented here demonstrates the power of the ideas of state and nation in shaping perceptions of self-interest and determining political loyalty. Yet the book also shows how political allegiances could and did change in response to the experience of military force. In so doing, it brings the Angolan case to the centre of debates on conflict in post-colonial Africa.