Shadrack Wanjala Nasong’o – författare

Bringing together scholars from a wide array of disciplines - including anthropology, economics, history, sociology, and political science - this volume addresses the problems of the regime change and state failure in Africa in the context of the global economy, but from a specifically African perspective, arguing that the underdevelopment of the African economy is linked to the underdevelopment of the continents' nation states.

This book focuses on the politics of democratization in Africa, especially the strategic choices of the political elite, both incumbent and opposition within the context of transition politics. The decade 1990- 2000 saw a total of 78 top leadership elections involving 43 of the 48 sub-Saharan African countries. Of these elections, only 27% led to regime change. Yet even where regime change occurred, authoritarianism persisted. The objective of the book is to analyze and explain this dual paradox of limited change of regime and persistent authoritarianism in the face of democratization. Its central thesis is that this eventuality is a function of the strategic environment of political engagement, which was not reshaped fundamentally to enable the emergence of a new mode of politics.Whereas the book focuses on Kenya and Zambia, it draws examples from a cross-section of African countries and its conclusions are applicable to most African countries and other democratizing countries across the world. The significance of the book is that it eschews country-specific analysis and employs the comparative approach in examining the social struggles for democracy in Africa. Its treatment of the rise of authoritarianism and the democratic counter-forces as well as the juxtaposition of "demo-pessimists" and "demoptimists" in Africanist scholarship is particularly innovative and cogently illuminating.