The African Affairs Reader

Nic Cheeseman is Associate Professor of African Politics at Oxford University. He is the author of Democracy in Africa: Successes, Failures and the Struggle for Political Reform (2015) and the co-editor of Our Turn to Eat (2010), The Handbook of African Politics (2013), and African Politics: Major Works (2016), as well as the co-author of the article 'Rethinking the 'presidentialism debate': Conceptualizing coalitional politics in cross-regional perspective (Democratization, 2014), which won the inaugural GIGA prize for the best article published in Comparative Area Studies. Dr Cheeseman is also the founding editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of African Politics, a former editor of the journal African Affairs, and an advisor to, and writer for, Kofi Annan's African Progress Panel.Lindsay Whitfield is Associate Professor at Roskilde University. She has a BA in Political Science and a BA in Economics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She completed an MPhil in Development Studies and a DPhil in Politics at the University of Oxford. Prior to joining Roskilde University, Dr Whitfield was a Junior Research Fellow at the Global Economic Governance Programme based at University College and the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford and then a Senior Project Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies. Carl Death joined the University of Manchester in August 2013, after four years in the Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, and a year in the School of Law and Government, Dublin City University. He has conducted research in South Africa, Tanzania, and the USA, and has held visiting researcher positions at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, Stellenbosch University, and the Centre for Civil Society (CCS) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban. In Fall 2015 he was a Visiting Fellow at Yale University, through the MacMillan Centre for International and Area Studies and the Agrarian Studies Program.

This reader sets a high standard on all counts, all the more remarkable for one that includes articles published only in a single journal, African Affairs. The journal's two current and one former editor (Cheeseman) teamed up to select this reader's contents. Perhaps more importantly, they wrote more than 80 pages of valuable introductions to the volume and its four main sections: 'The African State'; 'The Political Economy of Development'; 'Elections, Democracy, and Representation'; and 'Africa and the World.' The editors' judicious selections highlight the changing concerns, conceptions, and perspectives that continue to animate Africanist scholarship. Readers of many stripes, whether upper-level students, scholars, or non-Africanists seeking a compact overview of recent works on contemporary African affairs, will be well rewarded for perusing this book. The editors' introductions alone are worth their attention.

• PART ONE: THE AFRICAN STATE; PART TWO: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DEVELOPMENT; PART THREE: ELECTIONS, DEMOCRACY AND REPRESENTATION; PART FOUR: AFRICA AND THE WORLD