Sharath Srinivasan – författare

Sudan's Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005 ended over two decades of civil war and led to South Sudan's independence. Peacemaking that brought about the agreement and then sought to sustain it involved, alongside the Sudanese, an array of regional and western states as well as international organisations. This was a landmark effort to create and sustain peace in a war-torn region. Yet in the years that followed, multiple conflicts continued or reignited, both in Sudan and in South Sudan. Peacemaking attempts multiplied. Authored by both practitioners and scholars, this volume grapples with the question of which, and whose, ideas of peace and of peacemaking were pursued in the Sudans and how they fared. Bringing together economic, legal, anthropological and political science perspectives on over a decade of peacemaking attempts in the two countries, it provides insights for peacemaking efforts to come, in the Sudans and elsewhere.

Ours is an age of protest. Around the world, activists and movements believe in the potential of assembly to bring about important social and political change. The right of peaceful assembly has attracted growing policy and legal attention nationally and internationally as political actors are reminded of its power. Yet, this core civic freedom has received less scholarly exploration than the analogous rights of freedom of speech and association. In this context, The Oxford Handbook of Peaceful Assembly examines assembly as a distinct political and social practice that lies uneasily at the heart of the modern state, at times posing as a threat to the political status quo. The Handbook brings together a diverse and multidisciplinary range of experts to provide a critical, international overview of the topic. It breaks new ground by interrogating key dilemmas relating to the value, scope, and legal protection of assembly, offering critically needed analysis on assembly qua assembly. Contributions from lawyers, political theorists, sociologists, anthropologists, and historians interrogate the importance of assembly, its value, its status as a legal right, and the boundaries of its legitimate regulation. Global in scope and richly grounded in history, this Handbook serves as an authoritative, comprehensive resource on the right of peaceful assembly.

Across Africa, digital media are providing scholars with a reason and opportunity for revisiting the question, and the analytical lens, of publics with new vigour and less normative baggage. This book brings together a rich set of empirically grounded analyses of the diverse digital spaces and networks of communication springing up across the Eastern African region. The contributions offer a plural set of reflections on whether and how we can usefully think about these spaces and networks as convening publics, where citizens come together to discuss matters of common interest. The authors make clear the need to unshackle such studies from slavish acceptance of outsiders’ prescriptions on what constitutes desirable publics. They highlight the importance of being attentive to rapidly changing everyday realities across Africa in which people are coming together around the circulation of ideas in ways that include digital means of communications. In so doing, the contributions bring forward new ways of thinking about, through and with publics, alongside other heritages in Africanist scholarship that have continued salience. Looking outwards from the region, such different perspectives on our digitally mediated world offer theoretical novelty that advances how we think about the notion of publics and their political significance.This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Eastern African Studies.

Across Africa, digital media are providing scholars with a reason and opportunity for revisiting the question, and the analytical lens, of publics with new vigour and less normative baggage. This book brings together a rich set of empirically grounded analyses of the diverse digital spaces and networks of communication springing up across the Eastern African region. The contributions offer a plural set of reflections on whether and how we can usefully think about these spaces and networks as convening publics, where citizens come together to discuss matters of common interest. The authors make clear the need to unshackle such studies from slavish acceptance of outsiders’ prescriptions on what constitutes desirable publics. They highlight the importance of being attentive to rapidly changing everyday realities across Africa in which people are coming together around the circulation of ideas in ways that include digital means of communications. In so doing, the contributions bring forward new ways of thinking about, through and with publics, alongside other heritages in Africanist scholarship that have continued salience. Looking outwards from the region, such different perspectives on our digitally mediated world offer theoretical novelty that advances how we think about the notion of publics and their political significance.This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Eastern African Studies.