Amy Niang - Böcker

This book examines the multifaceted nature of conflict and the importance of the socio-economic and political contexts of conflict and violence and shows how to support ongoing initiatives and programs to build sustainable peace on the African continent. Drawing on a range of conceptual framings in the study of peace and conflict, from gender perspectives to institutionalist to decolonial perspectives, the contributors show how peacebuilding research covers a whole range of questions that go beyond concerns for post-conflict reconstruction strategies. Chapters focus on the methodological, theoretical and practical aspects of peacebuilding and provide a toolbox of perspectives for conceptualizing and doing peacebuilding research in Africa. Anchored in African-centered perspectives, the book encourages and promotes high-quality interdisciplinary research that is conflict-sensitive, historically informed, theoretically grounded and analytically sound. This book will be of benefit to scholars, policy makers and research institutions engaged in peacebuilding in Africa.

This book examines the multifaceted nature of conflict and the importance of the socio-economic and political contexts of conflict and violence and shows how to support ongoing initiatives and programs to build sustainable peace on the African continent. Drawing on a range of conceptual framings in the study of peace and conflict, from gender perspectives to institutionalist to decolonial perspectives, the contributors show how peacebuilding research covers a whole range of questions that go beyond concerns for post-conflict reconstruction strategies. Chapters focus on the methodological, theoretical and practical aspects of peacebuilding and provide a toolbox of perspectives for conceptualizing and doing peacebuilding research in Africa. Anchored in African-centered perspectives, the book encourages and promotes high-quality interdisciplinary research that is conflict-sensitive, historically informed, theoretically grounded and analytically sound. This book will be of benefit to scholars, policy makers and research institutions engaged in peacebuilding in Africa.

The Postcolonial African State in Transition offers a new perspective on a set of fundamental, albeit old questions with salient contemporary resonance: what is the nature of the postcolonial state? How did it come about? And more crucially, the book poses an often neglected question: what was the postcolonial African state internally built against? Through a detailed historical investigation of the Voltaic region, the book theorizes the state in transition as the constitutive condition of the African state, rendering centralization processes as always transient, uncertain, even dangerous endeavours. In Africa and elsewhere in the colonial and postcolonial world, the centralized sovereign state has become something of a meta-model that bears the imprint of necessity and determinism. This book argues that there is nothing natural, linear, conventional or intrinsically consensual about the centralized state form. In fact, the African state emerged, and was erected against, and at the expense of a variety of authority structures and forms of self-governance. The state has sustained itself through destructive practices, internal colonization, and in fact the production and alienation of a range of internal others.