Nationalism in African Politics

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Rich Dorman
Keyword(s):  
Political Conflict ◽  
Racial Groups ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
African Politics ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
New States ◽  
Artificial Boundaries ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Diverse Groups

African nationalism’s origins are found in anti-colonial protest and the artificial boundaries of post-colonial states. But it has proven a resilient force in African politics, alongside the colonially engineered states, with few border changes in the post-independence period. Despite the artificiality of the new states and nations, only a few new states emerge, with most political conflict aimed at ensuring inclusion within the state’s original boundaries. The experience of decolonization has led nationalist politics to be coalitional in form rather than ideological, bringing together diverse groups. Nation building strategies are deployed after independence to promote unity and development while depoliticizing, homogenizing, and gendering the nationalist legacy. Memorialization and iconography are deployed in this cause, but unevenly. The decades after independence are marked by single party or no-party rule in which the nationalist generations hold on to power. After the end of the cold war, when multiparty elections resumed in many states, and with the aging nationalists increasingly unable to maintain their hold on power, identity-based politics was transformed into an often violent politics of belonging, identifying some ethnic and racial groups as more fully national than others. In states that experienced liberation wars, the generation that led the struggle proved particularly resistant to handing over power, basing their claims on their nationalist credentials and seeking to discredit others. Yet generational and technological change ensured that subaltern groups, through creative and social media, as well as political movements, continued to claim, contest, and transform national imaginaries.

5. Women in African politics

2018 ◽  
pp. 56-67
Author(s):  
Ian Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Direct Impact ◽  
African Politics ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Active Involvement ◽  
Colonial Legacy ◽  
Societal Norms ◽  
New States

Gender inequality in Africa varies depending on the histories, culture, colonial legacy, and levels of economic development of each community. Generally, inequality is very real and has a direct impact upon the possibilities of the active involvement of women in political processes in Africa. ‘Women in African politics’ outlines the pre-colonial situation, the effects of colonialism on gender roles, and post-colonial Africa. At independence, most new states granted women the franchise. However, the societal norms of respectability, motherhood, and domestic responsibility often resulted in strong opposition to women playing particularly prominent roles in politics. Despite this, in recent years, women have begun mobilizing politically.

National Internationalists: British and West German Protests against Nuclear Weapons, the Politics of Transnational Communications and the Social History of the Cold War, 1957–1964

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 559-582 ◽  
Author(s):  
HOLGER NEHRING
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Social History ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Protest Movements ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

This article examines the politics of communication between British and West German protesters against nuclear weapons in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The interpretation suggested here historicises the assumptions of ‘transnational history’ and shows the nationalist and internationalist dimensions of the protest movements' histories to be inextricably connected. Both movements related their own aims to global and international problems. Yet they continued to observe the world from their individual perspectives: national, regional and local forms thus remained important. By illuminating the interaction between political traditions, social developments and international relations in shaping important political movements within two European societies, this article can provide one element of a new connective social history of the cold war.

Does Modernization Breed Ethnic Political Conflict?

1991 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 451-478 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saul Newman
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Ethnic Conflict ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
Long Term Stability ◽  
Cultural Ideologies ◽  
The World ◽  
Economic Modernization

Until the early 1970s many scholars believed that the process of economic modernization would result in the decline of ethnic political activity throughout the world. This melting pot modernization perspective failed on both theoretical and empirical grounds. After its collapse, scholars promoted a new conflictual modernization approach, which argued that modernization brought previously isolated ethnic groups into conflict. Although this approach accounted for the origins of ethnic conflict, it relied too heavily on elite motivations and could not account for the behavior of ethnic political movements. In the last five years, scholars have tried to develop a psychological approach to ethnic conflict. These scholars see conflict as stemming from stereotyped perceptions of differences among ethnic groups. This approach fails to analyze the tangible group disparities that reinforce these identifications and that may serve as the actual catalysts for ethnic political conflict. The conflictual modernization approach is reinvigorated by applying it to the cases of ethnic conflict in Canada and Belgium. In both of these countries the twin processes of economic modernization and political centralization intensified ethnic conflict while stripping ethnic movements of the romantic cultural ideologies and institutional frameworks that could provide these movements with some long-term stability. Thus, by integrating the modernization approach with a resource mobilization perspective we can develop theories that can account for ethnic conflict throughout the world.

State Failure and Challenges to Democratization in Africa

2009 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 361-363 ◽  
Author(s):  
James D. Fearon
Keyword(s):  
National Level ◽  
Commodity Price ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
International Pressure ◽  
Land Disputes ◽  
Oil Shock ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Public Revenues

When Things Fell Apart manages to be wonderfully concise but still compelling. The thing Robert Bates seeks to explain is the secular trend in sub-Saharan Africa toward civil war, although he often characterizes this in broader terms, as a trend toward “political conflict” or “political disorder.” He explains the trend as follows: Public revenues fell in the 1970s and 1980s as a result of commodity price declines, effects of the second oil shock, and bad economic policy choices that overtaxed farmers so that politicians could dispense patronage to smaller, politically more important urban constituencies. The decline in public revenues led elites to become more predatory, which caused an increase in political conflict by mobilizing opposition. Popular demands for political reform, along with increased international pressure for the same at the end of the Cold War, heightened elite insecurity and led to more predation. This had the effect of “provoking their citizens to take up arms” (p. 109). Further, state decline and national-level conflicts exacerbated simmering subnational conflicts, typically in the form of land disputes between locals and migrants from other tribes.

Eastern Europe in the Global History of Decolonization

2018 ◽  
pp. 350-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Mark ◽  
Quinn Slobodian
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War I ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
World War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
New States ◽  
History Of ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter places Eastern Europe into a broader history of decolonization. It shows how the region’s own experience of the end of Empire after the World War I led its new states to consider their relationships with both European colonialism and those were struggling for their future liberation outside their continent. Following World War II, as Communist regimes took power in Eastern Europe, and overseas European Empires dissolved in Africa and Asia, newly powerful relationships developed. Analogies between the end of empire in Eastern Europe and the Global South, though sometimes tortured and riddled with their own blind spots, were nonetheless potent rhetorical idioms, enabling imagined solidarities and facilitating material connections in the era of the Cold War and non-alignment. After the demise of the so-called “evil empire” of the Soviet Union, analogies between the postcolonial and the postcommunist condition allowed for further novel equivalencies between these regions to develop.

GLOBALIZATION AND SOCIAL INEQUALITY IN NIGERIA

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-154
Author(s):  
O.W. Adeleke ◽  
◽  
А.Т. Abzhaliyeva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Emerging Markets ◽  
Social Inequality ◽  
Developing Economies ◽  
State System ◽  
The West ◽  
Territorial Integrity ◽  
Market Economies ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
New States ◽  
Domestic Instability

Globalization creates social inequality and instability, it poses threat to sovereignty and territorial integrity not just in the post-colonial countries of Asia and Afrika, but also in the current Westphalia state system. Globalization often tacitly embolden demands for new states. Meanwhile, neo-liberalism that works in the well-established market economies in the West has failed to meet the target in the emerging markets of the developing economies. Although globalization comes with both enriching and impoverishing impacts, yet the impacts are known to be disruptive and contribute to domestic instability.

The Homeland Debate, Redux: The Political–Cultural Impact of the 1946–1949 Repatriation to Soviet Armenia

2020 ◽  
pp. 84-125
Author(s):  
Tsolin Nalbantian
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Armenian Identity ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Heating Up

Chapter 2 deals with the 1946-1949 Soviet repatriation drive to collect all worldwide Armenians and “return” them to the ASSR and, specifically, the Lebanese Armenian political-cultural understandings of it. I explore how that initiative formed a chapter of Lebanese (and other Middle Eastern) Armenians’ renegotiation of national belonging in early post-colonial times. And although about a third of all Armenian repatriates travelled via Beirut, I also look at those who remained in Lebanon and in other countries in the Middle East. The emerging Cold War was more than a backdrop to this story. Heating up, the Cold War – and the very divergent readings of, and responses to, the repatriation initiative among Lebanese Armenians – reinforced tensions between Armenian rightists and leftists. Armenians’ response to repatriation did not simply reflect their extant political-cultural positions. Rather, repatriation sharpened those positions. Responses to repatriation echoed issues on the changing Lebanese/Syrian/Armenian identity complex at the dawn of the post-colonial nation-state. The responses to repatriation included a retelling and a reconstitution of the history of the tragedy of the genocide. They also automatically triggered questions about the location and nature of the Armenian homeland, adding fuel to the division between Dashnaks and Armenian leftists.

Containment

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Preston
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
World War ◽  
Land War ◽  
The Government ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Cold War Consensus

Assessing the application of the liberal consensus idea to postwar foreign policy, this chapter contends that myths about the bipartisan spirit of U.S. foreign policy have too long found ready acceptance from historians. Politics did not stop at the water’s edge, even when bipartisanship was at its supposed zenith during World War II and the early Cold War. While there was unanimity during the post-war era that the growth of international communism was a threat to U.S. interests, this did not mean that foreign policy was free of political conflict, and partisan charges that the government of the day was losing the Cold War were commonplace. Meanwhile, non-elite opinion evinced little support for confrontation with the main Communist powers, reluctance to engage in another land war like Korea, and concern about survival in the nuclear era. The divisiveness wrought by Vietnam was supposed to have brought an end to the “Cold War consensus,” but uncertainty over its meaning was evident well before this.

Geopolitical Challenges

The Hijaz ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 207-278
Author(s):  
Malik R. Dahlan
Keyword(s):  
New Order ◽  
United Arab Republic ◽  
Alternative Structures ◽  
New States ◽  
Arab League ◽  
Regional Organisation ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Mandate System ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Second World

This geopolitical Chapter covers the impact of decolonization on Arab statehood and the challenge to accept the new order. It includes a discussion on the revival and reform of Arab self-determination after the mandate system was submerged. It gives an overview of independence and models of statehood. It describes the emergence of new states after the Second World War including: Saudi Arabia, the liberal monarchy model; Iran and Turkey, the secular western models. This Chapter also discusses failed attempts at regional organisation - ‘Arab disorganization’- including the United Arab Republic, the short-lived political union between Syria and Egypt between 1958 and 1961. Existing attempts at international Islamic organization in the form of the League of Arab States (now the Arab League) and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) are also discussed here. The common theme being a recognition of the importance of governance and of the Islamic worldview but ultimately a failure to unite and provide alternative structures to effectively compete with inherited Westphalian structures. In a chronological progression it covers the Cold War era leading up to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, Taliban, Al-Qaida and Daesh neo medievalism.

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