This book deals with the conflict between Northern and Southern Sudan over the Abeyi region and other border areas. First written in 1972 and updated with recent developments, Frontiers of Unity provides an essential background to the complexities of the conflict, looking at the factors behind it and calling for the resolution of Africa’s longest running dispute.
This book deals with problems frequently encoun-tered by agencies, managers, and technicians who try to implement large-scale development projects. Specifically, it focuses on the implementation problems associated with projects sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) and the World Bank in developing countries. Some historical background on how implementation problems became a focus of concern is presented below. Development assistance on a significant scale started with Marshall Plan aid to reconstruct Western Europe following World War II. [1] In that case, the donor (the United States) asked not to be part of the process that determined how the money was to be spent. Instead, the United States asked the West European countries to establish their own priorities for assistance (which they did after a considerable amount of inter-country negotiation).
Over the fifty years between 1940 and 1990, the countries of eastern Africa were embroiled in a range of debilitating and destructive conflicts, starting with the wars of independence, but then incorporating rebellion, secession and local insurrection as the Cold War replaced colonialism. The articles gathered here illustrate how significant, widespread, and dramatic this violence was. In these years, violence was used as a principal instrument in the creation and consolidation of the authority of the state; and it was also regularly and readily utilised by those who wished to challenge state authority through insurrection and secession. Why was it that eastern Africa should have experienced such extensive and intensive violence in the fifty years before 1990? Was this resort to violence a consequence of imperial rule, the legacy of oppressive colonial domination under a coercive and non-representative state system? Did essential contingencies such as the Cold War provoke and promote the use of violence? Or, was it a choice made by Africans themselves and their leaders, a product of their own agency? This book focuses on these turbulent decades, exploring the principal conflicts in six key countries – Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia and Tanzania. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Eastern African Studies.
This book presents case studies concerning the impact of development projects on societies at various levels of affluence and modernization. They demonstrate project variety, and the ecological, economic, political and social contexts within which development is attempted but seldom achieved.
This book explores an adventurous life of engagement in the challenges of economic development in a destitute China (1946-47), war-torn Korea (1951-52), divided Vietnam (1955-1957), and post-Sukarno Indonesia (1966-71). It also relates the author's subsequent experiences helping South Korea enter onto its high growth trajectory and Indonesia to modernize its financial system. Interspersed are vignettes of academic life at Deep Springs College, Cornell University, University of Michigan, Vanderbilt University and Harvard, and the challenges of working with the Navajo Nation to extract revenue and reduce pollution from exploitative coal-mining and power companies, as well as trying to devise an appropriate and viable approach to rural development for the remote, politically and culturally divided district of Abyei, on the border between North and South Sudan. Finally, it describes the author's efforts at preserving environmental and historical resources in Southeast Massachusetts. Throughout, the book recounts and acknowledges the important roles of teachers, colleagues, friends and family in enriching the author's fortunate life.
The performance of Nigeria has recently been vehemently criticized as not commensurate with her human and material potentialities. The hope that Nigeria is, by destiny, the African Giant appears to be fading. Some analysts, seeing this, have blamed it on the character defects of the leadership in Nigeria. They argue that because the leaders are predatory and corrupt, they have preoccupied themselves with their interests, which are primitive accumulation and luxurious lifestyles. Meanwhile, the rest of the citizens are suffering. This book argues that such character defects may indeed exist in some of Nigerian leaders. However, these are not the main reasons for their dismal performance regarding the welfare of the citizens. The main problem is that Nigerian leaders seem to have largely lost control over the state and its policies, which appear to have been captured by the dominant classes and groupslocal and international. Nigerias main problem is, therefore, a structural one. Nonetheless, the book concludesas the security, economic, political, and social crises intensifyNigerian leaders, even if it is simply for self-preservation, will be forced by the objective conditions to move against the interests of these dominant classes and groups. It is only then that Nigeria can realistically be restored to the possibility of becoming an African Giant.
A collection of studies that examines the current problems of world development in light of the past twenty-five years, but goes also beyond an examination of that experience to project practical and workable plans for the future
For over forty years the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID) has worked with countries in the developing world on the complex issues of economic and social reform. This volume describes the experience of the Institute in the challenging development assistance world of the 1980s and early 1990s, when HIID's largest projects involved work with countries attempting to move away from high levels of government intervention to more market-friendly systems. These efforts involved work in formerly centrally planned command economies (e.g., Russia, Vietnam, etc.) as well as in the mixed plan/market economies of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The book also describes HIID's efforts in education and health reform as well as in the rapidly expanding area of environmental economics and policy. Assisting Development in a Changing World is an unvarnished account written by the HIID practitioners who participated in these programs and edited by its former director and executive directors.
