Descriptions of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) – a relatively resilient rebel group in the Congo–Uganda borderland – are almost solely focused upon the rebellion's Islamic extremist characteristics. Through looking specifically at the ADF's recruitment practices, this paper seeks to problematise existing accounts of the group's constitution. It discusses how Islamic extremism has had a significant influence on various aspects of ADF recruitment, and therefore helps to explain particular dimensions of the ADF's composition. Nevertheless, this paper demonstrates that focusing on the role of Islamism alone, leaves a large part of the ADF's story untold – such as the important role played by recruitment networks associated with marginalised and militarised ex-combatants, or the populations of disenfranchised youth in the borderlands. Indeed, unresolved political and socio-economic injustices amongst the people of the Rwenzories have been just as significant motivating factors for joining the rebels as have Islamic sources. Thus, this paper argues that the ADF's recruitment practices and constitution cannot be sufficiently analysed without adequate recognition of the rebel group's position within a borderland context.

What explains the emergence of Islamist violence as a substantial security threat in such diverse contexts as Kenya, Mali and Nigeria? This article addresses this question through an exploration of the strategies of governance employed by states, and how these shape the emergence and mode of collective violence. Conflict research often emphasises the specificity of Islamist violence; but these conflicts can be understood as a form of political exclusion and grievance-based violence, comparable to other forms of political violence. Further, violent Islamist groups emerge from local conditions: the areas in which groups are established share similar local experiences of governance and political marginalisation; a history of violent conflict on which Islamist militants capitalise; and key triggering events expanding or reinforcing state exclusion. These findings challenge a narrative emphasising the global, interconnected nature of Islamist violence. This article pairs data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Dataset (ACLED) with Afrobarometer survey data and case study evidence to identify drivers of Islamist violence across three African countries.

This article explores the relationship between transnational governance initiatives for ‘conflict-free’ certification in the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the regulatory pluralism one finds on the ground. Efforts in certifying artisanal gold mining are scrutinised by analysing how three different gold mining sites in the DRC's South Kivu province are governed. Most artisanal mining in the DRC is usually referred to as ‘informal’ – a term associated with non-state actors. Instead, the article introduces the idea of a mode of governing that follows the principle of ‘débrouillardise’, which combines different rule systems and state and non-state regulators. It argues that ‘conflict-free’ governance will need to improvise via ad hoc agreements on the legal status of mining sites among state authorities, economic actors and international monitors. The act of declaring mining sites legal will provide for the semblance of a ‘conflict-free’ status and a unitary state system of rule, while in practice, the plurality of regulatory authority will not be reversed.

West African elites have successfully argued for an Economic Partnership Agreement Development Programme (EPADP) as part of free trade negotiations with the European Commission. ECOWAS officials state that the EPADP is necessary to realise the ‘development dimension’ of trade. In particular, they have (re)articulated Europe's own narratives relating to Aid for Trade and private sector development – insisting that the European Commission delivers on its promises. Accordingly, European negotiators have conceded the principle of the EPADP, stating that around €6·5 billion will be delivered. This article, however, examines the likely (in)capacity of the EPADP to meaningfully marry trade and development in the context of premature liberalisation under Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs). Crucially, it argues that West African extraversion in terms of EPADP resources may entrench predatory elites while locking-in ECOWAS states into inequitable trade structures that re-embed poverty in the region.

The past decade has seen the rapid rise of concepts such as the ‘China Model’ and the ‘Beijing Consensus’, yet more recent trends suggest a waning of their popularity. This article finds that the problem with the literature on the China model lies less with the concept itself than with a tendency to apply the term in an atheoretical and unempirical manner. From 2005 until at least 2012, Ethiopian elites from the upper echelons downwards were indeed engaged in a conscious and voluntary attempt to emulate aspects of China's perceived developmental successes. Drawing on interviews with 46 such elites, as well as on theories of lesson-drawing and cross-societal emulation, the study suggests that China may act as an example to countries seeking to achieve rapid modernisation and to navigate the perilous waters of political and economic globalisation. It is only by historicising and contextualising the ‘China Model’ within the older story of selective incorporation by certain ‘latecomer’ countries, however, that its true influence – and limits – can be understood.

On the face of it, the triumph of Robert Mugabe and ZANU(PF) in the 2013 elections came as a shock, not least to opposition MDC activists. However, after a period of introspection, many have begun to construct a coherent and wide-ranging account of the result which explores opposition shortcomings, and the revived relationship between the electorate and Mugabe's ZANU(PF). This article, based on interviews with political activists conducted three months after the election, outlines and attempts to explain this account. It explores the way in which a politics of polarisation that dominated Zimbabwe in recent years appears to have given way to a politics of ambivalence: where Zimbabweans once viewed their political landscape as one populated by antinomies, they now see their state and its relation to themselves in more complex and ambiguous ways. As a result, Zimbabweans' conception of the state is increasingly coming to resemble Mbembe's formulation of states as contemporaneously ‘organizers of public happiness’ and wielders of arbitrary violence.

White Africans are particularly associated with the troubles South Africa and Zimbabwe have faced throughout their histories. The story of the Franco-Mauritians, the white elite of Mauritius, and how they have fared during more than forty years since the Indian Ocean island gained independence, is much less known. However, their case is relevant as a distinctive example when attempting to understand white Africans in postcolonial settings. Unlike whites elsewhere on the continent, Franco-Mauritians did not apply brute force in order to defend their position in the face of independence. Yet the society that emerged from the struggle over independence is one shaped by dominant beliefs about ethnicity. As this article shows, despite a number of inverse effects Franco-Mauritians have benefited from this unexpected twist, and part of the explanation for their ability to maintain their elite position lies therefore in the complex reality of ethnic diversity in postcolonial Mauritius.

This paper examines the impact of regional sanctions on the trajectory of the Burundian regime following the 1996 coup. Despite the country's socioeconomic and geopolitical vulnerability, the Buyoya government initially withstood the pressure from sanctions. Through a vocal campaign against these measures, the new government mitigated the embargo's economic consequences and partially re-established its international reputation. Paradoxically, this campaign planted the seed for long-term comprehensive political concessions. While previous literature has attributed the embargo's success to its economic impact, the government actually responded to the sanction senders' key demand to engage in unconditional, inclusive peace talks once the economy had already started to recover. Based on a novel framework for studying the signalling dimension of sanctions, I show how the regime's anti-sanctions campaign, with its emphasis on the government's willingness to engage in peace talks, backfired, with Buyoya forced to negotiate after having become entrapped in his own rhetoric.

Fiscal sociology has alleged the existence of a mutually reinforcing effect between the emergence of representative government and effective taxation. This paper looks at Benin, a low-income country that successfully democratised in the early 1990s. It finds that Benin appears to have reinforced its extractive capacities since democratisation. However, the effect of democratisation has been indirect, while the influence of the International Financial Institutions (IFI) and the size of the country's informal sector have played a more direct role. Nevertheless, the hypothesis that effective taxation is based on a quasi-consensual relationship between the state and the taxpayers finds some confirmation.

The Mozambican Land Law of 1997 intends to provide flexible rules of access to land, while securing local people's customary rights, as well as equal rights for women and men. Drawing on participant observation during a ‘land delimitation’ process in central Mozambique, this article analyses the complex negotiation ensuing from the implementation of the Land Law in a local community. It shows how the delimitation process provided spaces for asserting – male – roles of power and authority, while local women were increasingly marginalised in the process. By presenting oral testimonies from women in the community, the authors seek to balance the account, providing women's perspectives on the highly gendered character of interests in, access to, and exclusion from land. The analysis ends with the question: What would be required to provide a space for local women to articulate their interests in a secure access to land during the delimitation process itself?

Orthodox approaches to development view the market as a key institution for driving economic transformation and for fostering innovation and competitiveness. The working of markets alone, however, does not always lead to improved outcomes such as increase in productivity or production efficiency in the context of smallholders. The role of non-market institutions, therefore, remains important. This paper examines the role of intermediary coordination in addressing constraints to efficiency and productivity of smallholder sugarcane producers in Tanzania. It also makes a contrastive analysis of a different organisational arrangement for smallholder sugarcane producers in Malawi. The key proposition is that while intermediary organisations of cane outgrowers in Tanzania have played a significant role in promoting effective market linkage, an increase in productivity required for competitiveness is limited by the lack of effective horizontal coordination.

Traders in Cotonou (Bénin), a prominent hub in the Euro–West African second-hand car trade, traditionally sold cars imported from Europe. Since the 2000s however, more and more cars are being imported from the US. Anthropological study of one group of entrepreneurs active in this new business, traders from Niger, reveals an African entrepreneurship at work that follows a distinct social pattern: traders are groomed in close kinship ties in West Africa and then develop new social ties with overseas migrants. Their trade thus becomes embedded in more globalised networks, yet at the same time it loosens and that works against profitable business. Close analysis of their careers reveals a cultural pattern that compels entrepreneurs to become traders, economic opportunity notwithstanding. Whether this is representative of Africa's changing place in the global economic order remains to be seen; however, this article suggests how culture in entrepreneurship may be key to understanding that.

Since the signing of the Sun City peace agreement in 2002, the Democratic Republic of Congo has strived to democratise with limited success. This paper explores some of the challenges of the process of democratisation in the Congo. It does so not by looking at democratisation policies and practices, but by focusing on identity construction and how these identities manifest themselves in Congolese engagements with the process of democratisation as a process that is pursued in partnership with Western donors. The paper traces the construction of an understanding of democracy as a means to make an end to perpetual victimisation of Congolese people due to foreign interference in the Congo. The paper argues that the concept of democracy has acquired over time a meaning that creates a highly ambivalent engagement with the current democratisation process, and in particular with Western donors of this process, which are simultaneously perceived as the main obstacles to its successful realisation.

Guinea-Bissau has been regularly described as a ‘narco-state’. Yet, few studies analyse how drug trafficking has evolved here. Based on extensive interviews in Guinea-Bissau over several years, this paper documents the process. It concludes that using the term ‘narco-state’, where much of the state has little or no capacity, is inappropriate. A better approach is to analyse the actions of key players as an elite protection network. In Guinea-Bissau, that network did not act on its own, but relied on a series of ‘entrepreneurs' who operated as an interface between traffickers and the elite. While the military as an institution is often said to be in charge of trafficking, exclusive control by high-ranking military personnel within the elite network only occurred relatively late. Senior soldiers' attempts to provide more than just protection, and to enter the drug market themselves, led to the network's undoing.

This comparative analysis examines how large-scale agricultural land acquisitions are implemented in Ghana and Kenya, using embedded case studies of two specific investment projects. We find that insufficiencies in these countries' land governance systems are partly caused by discrepancies between de jure and de facto procedures and that powerful actors tend to operate in the legal grey areas. These actors determine the implementation of projects to a large extent. Displacement and compensation are highly emotive issues that exacerbate tensions around the investment. We also find that large-scale land acquisitions have a feedback effect on the land governance system, which suggests that large-scale land acquisitions can be drivers of institutional change. We suggest there may be a window of opportunity here to reform these land governance systems.

Research carried out in two densely populated wards of Kampala in 2012 shows that food-insecure households dropped, or significantly decreased, their consumption of matoke, the plantain staple, soon after its availability declined and the market price rose. They shifted to a diet for which the base was a stiff maize porridge (posho), eating just one meal a day. Many such households were headed by grandparents, single grandmothers especially. For the full set of household heads interviewed (118), access to rural family land (kibanja) stood out as critical for achieving year-round urban food security. With few exceptions, households that farmed ‘at home’ – about half the sample – saw themselves as food secure. Access negotiations, however, could be difficult, especially for women. The growing number of grandparents responsible for raising grandchildren and nieces/nephews, many of whom were orphaned, has given rise to a new discourse whereby care is increasingly given to maternal grandchildren.

This article offers a political analysis of the practices and motives of public order policing in Ethiopia and Uganda. It offers an explanation of the continuation of forceful tactics against political protest in a context of changing methods of information gathering, organisation and mobilisation by urban activists resulting from their access to internet and communication technology. It finds the two regimes, as anocracies, are caught between legally allowing protest and yet, conscious of their fragility, determined to crush opposition. For the latter approach, their militarist leaderships rely heavily on continued police violence. The paper concludes that failure of the police to adapt their public order policing to the new protest environment leaves them increasingly ineffective and unpopular. It is likely to provoke an escalation of violence and may both undermine the legitimacy of their regimes and reverse their attempts to open political space that justified their rebellions against former autocracies.

An emerging perspective on Community Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) in Zimbabwe is that increased authoritarianism in governance has enabled elite capture of wildlife resources and silenced local people's voices. This paper qualifies this perspective, showing how ordinary people continue to raise their concerns about local governance. In the Mbire district, people's interpretations of an upsurge in lion attacks on livestock and people in early 2010 took on a dimension of social commentary on the evolving governance arrangements in the district and beyond. Beneath an apparent human–wildlife conflict lie complex human–human conflicts about access to, and governance of, wildlife resources. Interpretations of the lion attacks built on two distinct epistemologies – a local religious discourse on spirit lions and an ecological one – but invariably construed outsiders as the ones accountable for local problems. This construction of outsiders is also a salient feature of Zimbabwean political discourse. Local voices thus constitute a widely understood discourse of protest.

This paper argues that when police reform in Sierra Leone was instituted to consolidate a state system after the country's civil war ended in 2002, it reproduced a hybrid order instead that is embodied by Sierra Leone's primary local leaders: paramount and lesser chiefs. In this sense, policing has a distinctly political quality to it because those who enforce order also define what order is and determine access to resources. The hybrid authority of Sierra Leone's chiefs emanates from multiple state-based and localised sources simultaneously and comes into play as policing takes place and police reform moves forward. This argument is substantiated by an ethnographic exploration of how and with what implications community policing has been introduced in Peyima, a small town in Kono District, and focuses on one of its primary institutional expressions, Local Policing Partnership Boards.