People’s Voices on the Sustainable Forest Reform in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Since the early 2000s, the Democratic Republic of Congo has been conducting a reform of its forestry sector with the publication of The Forest Code (2002). The implementation of this law, which aims to assure the participation of all stakeholders, has been evolving slowly since then. The present research aims to evaluate the knowledge local communities and indigenous people detain over the ongoing reform, and the expectations they created when negotiations over the implementation of industrial harvesting activities in their traditional territories began. By interviewing local people, we came to understand that insufficient knowledge regardin the law gathers with a lack of concern towards ecological or environmental matters and with the need of seeing basic needs satisfied; all this in a context in which different stakeholders’ responsibilities and negotiational terms are often misunderstood.

Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony in Ethiopia: Imagining a Post-TPLF Order

This article examines the discursive strategies, the ideological dominations and interrelated material tools employed by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in maintaining its rule. It also unravels the hegemonic crisis it has encountered, and the counter-hegemony it has confronted since 2015. Gramscian novelties of historical bloc, hegemony, organic crisis, counter-hegemony, and interregnum, are deployed in order to understand the continuities, ruptures and crises witnessed in Ethiopia’s politics for the past thirty years. The article interprets the crisis of the TPLF since the 2015 protests through the prism of organic crises and analyses the counter-hegemonic contestations, the interregnum and the ongoing war since 4 November 2020. The article adds to the recent resurgence of interest in Gramscian perspectives by demonstrating the relevance of Gramscian concepts to the understanding of politics in the states of the global south.

“Localising Tropical Medicine”: A History of the Medical Research Institute (MRI) in Colonial Lagos, 1907–1920s

This article explores an early episode in the history of tropical medicine in colonial Lagos, British West Africa. It probes into the activities and outputs of scientists who operated within the Medical Research Institute (MRI) as a way to further complicate the agendas of tropical medicine. Scientists of the MRI undertook biomedical experimentation with a profound understanding of metropolitan and local imperatives as both determined the extent to which they contributed to popular discourses. The present paper explores the extent to which metropole-colony relations triggered local scientists at the MRI to resort to all available means, including human experimentation, in the course of ambitious scientific projects. In certain other contexts, international and local motivations converged to sway the ambivalent postures of colonial scientists to biomedical experimentation.

Gagliardone, Iginio. 2019. China, Africa, and the Future of the Internet. London: Zed Books.

He holds a PhD and is Assistant Professor at the Department of Politics, Philosophical Faculty, University of Hradec Králové, Czech Republic. He specialises in Chinese modern history, Chinese foreign politics, international relations in Asia, and the history of Asian political thinking. He is the author of the book John Rawls a Teorie Mezinárodních Vztahů [John Rawls and the Theory of International Relations]. E-mail: [email protected]

Post-Genocide, Post-Apartheid: The Shifting Landscapes of African Philosophy, 1994–2019

This article traces the developments of African philosophy since 1994, a year marked by two events that profoundly impacted Africa: the fall of apartheid and the Rwandan genocide. The article projects a fundamental tension into the history of recent African philosophy: between optimism and idealism, showing in the development of normative concepts and a new philosophical vocabulary for Africa – a “conceptual mandelanization” (Edet 2015: 218), on the one hand, and a critical realism ensuing from the experience of African “simple, that is, flawed, humanity” (Nganang: 2007: 30), on the other. The article identifies prominent trends in African philosophy since 1994, including Ubuntu, the Calabar School of Philosophy, Afrikology, the Ateliers de la pensée, Francophone histories of African philosophy, and Lusophone political and cultural philosophy.

Electoral Arrangements and Turnout Variance at the Sub-National Level: Comparative Insights from Three Constituencies in Ghana

Using micro-level data from three constituencies in Ghana, which are cases of high, average and low turnout respectively, I assess whether voters’ perceptions of the cost of voting (resource and time) can explain such variation in voter turnout. Results suggest that in Ghana, such individual perceptions of the cost associated with voting do not help in explaining variance in voter turnout at the constituency level: Across the different levels of turnout, there is little to no variance in voters’ perceptions. I find that the high positive perceptions of the electoral processes across high, average, and low turnout constituencies are not only due to the activities of the electoral management body but among others, the adjustments by citizens to the process based on their experiences from past elections.

A Partnership of Un-Equals: Global South–North Research Collaborations in Higher Education Institutions

With the realisation that institutions of higher learning may play a powerful role in transforming the world, research partnerships between institutions in the Global South and North have gained popularity. These partnerships are meant to empower and strengthen the contribution of higher learning institutions and bridge the North/South knowledge divide. Considering the limited access to research resources in the Global South, it is anticipated that these partnerships will create research opportunities for scholars. However, while it can be acknowledged that the research partnerships can be of benefit to African institutions and economy, there are practical challenges that limit the success of most research partnerships. Using the authors’s experience this article explores and describes issues that surround research collaborations between institutions of higher learning in the Global South and North.