Abstract
The African continent encompasses a rich mosaic of peoples, cultures, ecological settings, and historical experiences. Africa’s vast expanse of 11,677,240 square miles (30,244,050 square kilometers) stretches from the Mediterranean in the north to the meeting point of the Atlantic and Indian oceans in the south. The 500 million people of Africa (roughly 10 percent of the globe’s population) are as diverse as the terrain they inhabit. The blacks and Arabs who live on the continent (together with small concentrations of Asians and whites) speak more than eight hundred languages, belong to hundreds of ethnic groups, and over the years have embraced many animist belief systems as well as all the great religions (most notably, Christianity and Islam). Although 70 percent of the continent’s people live in the rural areas and make their living as farmers and pastoralists, rapidly growing ancient and new cities are also sprinkled over the map of Africa. Subsistence agriculture is sustained alongside hi-tech industries; the world’s greatest mineral reserves are to be found in regions of the most abject poverty; universities thrive where illiteracy still prevails.
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Notes
An excellent overview may be found in Richard Sandbrook, The Politics of Africa’s Economic Stagnation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), esp. pp. 1–62.
Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg, “Why Africa’s Weak States Persist: The Empirical and the Judicial in Statehood,” World Politics 35, no. 1 (1982): 1–25, offer external explanations for this durability. More recently, other interpretations have been suggested.
See Donald Rothchild and Naomi Chazan, eds., The Precarious Balance: State and Society in Africa (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1988).
Roger Charlton, “Dehomogenising the Study of African Politics—The Case of Inter-State Influence on Regime Formation and Change,” Plural Societies 14, no. 1/2 (1983): 32–48.
Richard Hodder-Williams, An Introduction to the Politics of Tropical Africa (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984), is insistent on this point.
For some overviews of this literature, see Richard A. Higgott, Political Development Theory: The Contemporary Debate (London: Croom Helm, 1983),
and Samuel P. Huntington, “The Change to Change: Modernization, Development and Politics,” Comparative Politics 4, no. 3 (1971): 55–79.
For a critical discussion, see Irene L. Gendzier, Managing Political Change: Social Scientists and the Third World (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1985).
Leonard Binder et al., Crises and Sequences in Political Development (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971). In this text, the term “challenges” is preferred to “crises.”
For two examples, see Ronald Cohen and John Middleton, eds., From Tribe to Nation in Africa: Studies in Incorporation Processes (Scranton, Pa.: Chandler Publishing, 1970),
and Leo Kuper and M.G. Smith, eds., Pluralism in Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).
For a good summary of this literature, see Aristide Zolberg, Creating Political Order: The Party States of West Africa (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1966).
For one example, see Roger Genoud, Nationalism and Economic Development in Ghana (New York: Praeger, 1969).
This term was promulgated by Samuel P. Huntington. See his Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968) and “Political Development and Political Decay,” World Politics 17, no. 3 (1965): 386–430.
Richard Sandbrook, “The Crisis in Political Development Theory,” The Journal of Development Studies 12, no. 2 (1976): 165–185.
Some of the most notable examples of these early studies include: Aristide Zolberg, One Party Government in the Ivory Coast (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964);
James S. Coleman, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958);
Ruth Schachter Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-Speaking Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1964);
Crawford Young, Politics in the Congo (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965).
Theotonio Dos Santos, “The Structure of Dependence,” in Charles K. Wilbert, ed., The Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 109.
Immanuel Wallerstein, “Dependence in an Interdependent World,” African Studies Review 17, no. 1 (1974): 7.
Also see Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974).
For a good collection of such essays, see Dennis L. Cohen and John Daniel, eds., Political Economy of Africa: Selected Readings (London: Longman, 1981).
See, for some examples, Nicola Swainson, The Development of Corporate Capitalism in Kenya 1918–1977 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980);
Colin Leys, Underdevelopment in Kenya (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974);
and John Saul, The State and Revolution in Eastern Africa (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979).
This more careful revision of existing approaches is apparent, for example, in such works as Crawford Young, Ideology and Development in Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982),
and Sara Berry, Fathers Work for Their Sons: Accumulation, Mobility and Class Formation in an Extended Yoruba Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
Also see Frederick Cooper, “Africa and the World Economy,” African Studies Review 24, no. 2/3 (1981): 1–86.
Ali A. Mazrui and Michael Tidy, Nationalism and New States in Africa (London: Heinemann, 1984).
The most sophisticated analysis in this approach may be found in Thomas M. Callaghy, The State-Society Struggle: Zaire in Comparative Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
Also see Christopher Clapham, Third World Politics: An Introduction (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), and Sand-brook, The Politics of Africa’s Economic Stagnation.
For a general collection see Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Reuschemeyer, and Theda Skoçpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
Also, for a more patrimonial view, see Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg, Personal Rule in Black Africa: Prince, Autocrat, Prophet, Tyrant (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
For some general examples, see Ken C. Koteka and Robert W. Adams, The Corruption of Power: African Politics (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1981),
and Henry Bretton, Power and Politics in Africa (Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1973).
Also see Patrick Chabal, ed., Political Domination in Africa (London: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Donald Rothchild and Robert L. Curry, Jr., Scarcity, Choice and Public Policy in Middle Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
See also Robert Bates, “Agrarian Politics,” in Myron Weiner and Samuel P. Huntington, eds., Understanding Political Development (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), pp. 160–195, for a collective choice approach, which is based on somewhat different premises.
Andrew M. Kamarck, The Tropics and Economic Development (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), Chapter 2.
This point is highlighted in William Tordoff, Government and Politics in Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 2–3.
Ali A. Mazrui, The African Condition: A Political Diagnosis (London: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
Adrian Leftwich, Redefining Politics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), pp. 26–27.
Also see Richard A. Higgott, “From Modernization Theory to Public Policy: Continuity and Change in the Political Science of Political Development,” Studies in Cooperative International Development 5, no. 4 (1987): pp. 26–57.
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© 1992 Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.
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Chazan, N., Mortimer, R., Ravenhill, J., Rothchild, D. (1992). The Diversity of African Politics: Trends and Approaches. In: Politics and Society in Contemporary Africa. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12976-8_2
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