Zed Books – serie

This open access book examines the often overlooked entanglements and affinities between emerging models of formal and informal finance and welfare with longer-running religious structures and concerns.In Kenya, mutual aid has long mediated microcredit contracts and the social contract between citizens and the state. In effect, mutual aid has been organized in ways that contributed to mistrust in financial and state institutions as well as among families and neighbours. Nevertheless, diverse mutual aid arrangements have thrived and proliferated, not least because collaborating parties actively recognize the influence of invisible third parties such as God or Satan. The resulting forms of trust and mistrust range from the contractual to the mutual and everything in-between. Together, they highlight how speaking of trust in a language of religious faith sustains possibilities for contingency, creativity, and change alongside the reproduction of pre-existing inequalities and moral prejudices.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by UKRI.

In this important, multidisciplinary, open access study, Daniel Akech Thiong shows that the relations between climate disaster, pastoralist migration, and intercommunal conflict in Africa reach farther, both in time and space, than we realize.Focusing on the climate-shock-induced migrations of the Dinka people of South Sudan's Jonglei state into the Equatoria region, Thiong investigates the long-term ecological roots of conflicts among pastoralists, or between pastoralists and agriculturalists, over access shrinking waterholes and grazing zones. In so doing, he not only offers important correctives to prevalent, short-term narratives around individual political conflicts—narratives that provide little fodder for any long-term solutions--but also sheds new light on the role of governance, both national and local, in creating or mitigating the conflicts. Thiong in fact reveals examples of unusual cooperation between diverse ethnic groups amidst climate-change-induced disasters, and these findings shed new light on similar developments elsewhere in Africa, all of which offers new lessons for those who wish to mitigate future clashes related to climate-shock-induced displacement and encourage social stability. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.

This open access book offers the first full-length, empirical deep-dive into everyday policework in the Democratic Republic of Congo. At the same time, its findings go well beyond the DRC and Africa, ultimately providing a new, startlingly nuanced theoretical framework for understanding what police practice and reform efforts tell us about states anywhere in the world.Following officers from the classroom to the station and the street, Michel Thill offers five narrative-driven chapters rich with historical detail and thick description that show how the police force, as an institution, struggles to coordinate practice with training, coercion with persuasion and reconciliation, and the need to make ends meet with the duty to serve the public. By delving into the convoluted repercussions of police reform, Thill identifies the tensions that shape everyday policework, thereby offering new ways of thinking about police reform while offering practical guidance for practitioners and policymakers.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.

Leading Horn of Africa expert Charlotte Touati exposes the role played by Canadian gold mining company Nevsun and other global actors in propping up the regime of Isayas Aferwerki, one of Africa’s most dangerous dictators. In the process, Touati shows how global capital networks help perpetuate economic and political instability in the Horn of Africa, which in turn is fostering violence and volatility throughout other parts of the world. Using a narrative framework and a core cast of characters to help guide non-specialist readers through her findings, Touati explains the enormous significance of how Nevsun partnered with Aferwerki to open the Bisha gold mine and save his regime from bankruptcy. When Eritrean refugees later claimed they were “conscripted” to work in the mines without pay and abused as part of their National Service, Nevsun hired lobbyists to defend Eritrea’s actions and cast the very notion of human rights as a Western “Trojan horse.” Australian, Chinese, and Russian actors gradually became involved, and even the propaganda and disinformation campaigns of the infamous Russian Wagner Group seem ultimately to stem from the rhetoric of Afewerki and his lobbyists. This violently anti-Western rhetoric was injected into a pan-Africanist discourse to become an ideological and rhetorical toolbox. It was used to prevent any intervention on behalf of Eritreans trapped in their own country or Tigrayans targeted for genocide in neighboring Ethiopia. It was employed to legitimize new conflicts throughout the Sahel and the rest of Africa's notorious “Coup Belt.” And ultimately, it took on even wider global dimensions with regard to the ongoing crisis around the Red Sea ports, which Eritrea controls, and with regard to the question of the influence of the Gulf States in the Horn of Africa.

Leading Horn of Africa expert Charlotte Touati exposes the role played by Canadian gold mining company Nevsun and other global actors in propping up the regime of Isayas Aferwerki, one of Africa’s most dangerous dictators. In the process, Touati shows how global capital networks help perpetuate economic and political instability in the Horn of Africa, which in turn is fostering violence and volatility throughout other parts of the world. Using a narrative framework and a core cast of characters to help guide non-specialist readers through her findings, Touati explains the enormous significance of how Nevsun partnered with Aferwerki to open the Bisha gold mine and save his regime from bankruptcy. When Eritrean refugees later claimed they were “conscripted” to work in the mines without pay and abused as part of their National Service, Nevsun hired lobbyists to defend Eritrea’s actions and cast the very notion of human rights as a Western “Trojan horse.” Australian, Chinese, and Russian actors gradually became involved, and even the propaganda and disinformation campaigns of the infamous Russian Wagner Group seem ultimately to stem from the rhetoric of Afewerki and his lobbyists. This violently anti-Western rhetoric was injected into a pan-Africanist discourse to become an ideological and rhetorical toolbox. It was used to prevent any intervention on behalf of Eritreans trapped in their own country or Tigrayans targeted for genocide in neighboring Ethiopia. It was employed to legitimize new conflicts throughout the Sahel and the rest of Africa's notorious “Coup Belt.” And ultimately, it took on even wider global dimensions with regard to the ongoing crisis around the Red Sea ports, which Eritrea controls, and with regard to the question of the influence of the Gulf States in the Horn of Africa.