Philip Aka – författare

This book is a broad-ranging argument for thorough reforms at home and abroad in Nigeria as the only antidote to the nation-building dilemmas Nigeria confronts in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Because of its enormous material and human endowments, Nigeria is dubbed the “Giant of Africa.” It is a moniker many of its leaders take seriously. Yet, Nigeria is a state rife with instability, some of it periodically erupting into violence. Given still-ongoing national security challenges in the land that notoriously includes a bloody religion-oriented terrorism, the Fourth Republic since 1999, the longest period of continuous democratic rule since independence—key to the timeline of this book—has not been insulated from the spell of instability. The main argument of this work is that internationally agreed-upon ethical standards embedded in human rights can save Nigeria. This book is a methodologically and theoretically-grounded, seminal discourse on Nigerian foreign relations that spells out the human rights or lack thereof in those relations, including underlying and impinging domestic forces. This work is set around six issues of application embedded in a temple of Nigeria’s human rights foreign policy, comprising two steps and four pillars: reconstructed national interest, increased human rights at home, redesigned peacekeeping, reshaped foreign policy machinery, increased bilateralism in foreign relations, and the use of ECOWAS as human rights tool. Although focused on the period since independence, for proper understanding of events from the past that shape the current patterns of politics in the land, this book also embodies a historical background chapter that overviews the pre-colonial and colonial eras.

Using the major theories of humor as a point of departure, Humor in Pedagogy in Tertiary Education in the Age of COVID-19: Bosnia in Comparative Perspective argues for the expanded use of humor as pedagogy in Bosnian tertiary education, unfazed by the pandemic infections of COVID-19, with teachable lessons for other countries. It argues that the measures put in place to contain the spread of the pandemic neither foreclosed nor rendered less exigent, the drive for more quality education in Bosnia achieved through various means that include creative application of humor in tertiary education. Rather than minimize it, the era of non-classroom-based instructions ushered by COVID-19 offers an opportunity to promote intelligible learning by infusion of humor into every aspect of tertiary instruction, from course syllabus to student evaluation of faculty teaching. Key highlights of this book include the features of Bosnian self-parody that it articulates as material for pedagogy in Bosnian tertiary classrooms, the boundaries for judicious use of humor in pedagogy that it spells out, and its formulation related to the continued value of humor in the Bosnian tertiary classroom unfazed by the public health challenges of COVID-19. The book is designed as an innovative and less contentious contribution to the debates on educational reforms in postwar Bosnia, a contribution focused positively around the quality—and quantity—of instructions in tertiary institutions in Bosnia.