The African Affairs Reader: Key Texts in Politics, Development, and International Relations

African Affairs is the top journal in African Studies and has been for some time. This book draws together some of the most influential, important, and thought provoking articles published in its pages over the last decade. In doing so, it collates essential cutting-edge research on Africa and makes it easily available for students, teachers, and researchers alike. The African Affairs Reader is broken down into four sections that cover some of the biggest themes and questions facing the continent today, including: the African State, the Political Economy of Development, Africa's Relationship with the World, and Elections, Representation & Democracy. Within each section, articles deal with some of the most significant recent trends and events, such as the prospects for democratization in Ghana and Nigeria, the factors underpinning Rwanda's economic success, the rise of political corruption in South Africa, the spread of the drugs trade, the struggle against gender based violence, and the growing influence of China. Each section is introduced by a new purpose-written essay by the journal's editors that explains the evolution of the wider debate, highlights key contributions, and suggests new ways in which the discussion can be taken forward. Taken together, the essays and articles included in the volume provide both a coherent introduction to the study of Africa and a compelling commentary on the current state of play on the continent.

Table of Contents:
1: Nic Cheeseman, Carl Death and Lindsay Whitfield: An introduction to African Affairs and African Studies PART ONE: THE AFRICAN STATE 2: Nic Cheeseman, Carl Death and Lindsay Whitfield: An introduction to the African state 3: Crawford Young: The End of the Post-Colonial State in Africa? Reflections on Changing African Political Dynamics 4: Catherine Boone: Property and Constitutional Order: Land tenure reform and the future of the African state 5: Stephen Ellis and Mark Shaw: Does organized crime exist in Africa? PART TWO: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DEVELOPMENT 6: Lindsay Whitfield: An introduction to the political economy of development 7: Stefano Ponte: The Politics of ownership: Tanzania coffee policy in the age of liberal reformism 8: Deborah Bräutigam: Close Encounters: Chinese business networks as industrial catalysts in Sub-Saharan Africa 9: David Booth and Frederick Golooba-Mutebi: Developmental patrimonialism? The case of Rwanda PART THREE: ELECTIONS, DEMOCRACY AND REPRESENTATION 10: Nic Cheeseman: An introduction to elections, democracy and representation 11: J. Shola Omotola: Elections and Democratic Transition in Nigeria under the Fourth Republic 12: Anja Osei: Elites and Democracy in Ghana: A social network approach 13: Tom Lodge: Neo-Patrimonial Politics in the ANC PART FOUR: AFRICA AND THE WORLD 14: Carl Death: An introduction to Africa and the world 15: Frederick Cooper: What Is the Concept of Globalization Good for? An African Historian's Perspective 16: Peace Medie: Fighting gender-based violence: The women's movement and the enforcement of rape law in Liberia 17: Giles Mohan and Ben Lampert: Negotiating China: Reinserting African Agency into China-Africa relations 18: Tim Murithi: Briefing: The African Union at Ten: An appraisal

About the Author :
Nic Cheeseman is Associate Professor of African Politics at Oxford University. He is the author of Democracy in Africa: Successes, Failures and the Struggle for Political Reform (2015) and the co-editor of Our Turn to Eat (2010), The Handbook of African Politics (2013), and African Politics: Major Works (2016), as well as the co-author of the article 'Rethinking the 'presidentialism debate': Conceptualizing coalitional politics in cross-regional perspective (Democratization, 2014), which won the inaugural GIGA prize for the best article published in Comparative Area Studies. Dr Cheeseman is also the founding editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of African Politics, a former editor of the journal African Affairs, and an advisor to, and writer for, Kofi Annan's African Progress Panel. Lindsay Whitfield is Associate Professor at Roskilde University. She has a BA in Political Science and a BA in Economics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She completed an MPhil in Development Studies and a DPhil in Politics at the University of Oxford. Prior to joining Roskilde University, Dr Whitfield was a Junior Research Fellow at the Global Economic Governance Programme based at University College and the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford and then a Senior Project Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies. Carl Death joined the University of Manchester in August 2013, after four years in the Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, and a year in the School of Law and Government, Dublin City University. He has conducted research in South Africa, Tanzania, and the USA, and has held visiting researcher positions at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, Stellenbosch University, and the Centre for Civil Society (CCS) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban. In Fall 2015 he was a Visiting Fellow at Yale University, through the MacMillan Centre for International and Area Studies and the Agrarian Studies Program.

Review :
This reader sets a high standard on all counts, all the more remarkable for one that includes articles published only in a single journal, African Affairs. The journal's two current and one former editor (Cheeseman) teamed up to select this reader's contents. Perhaps more importantly, they wrote more than 80 pages of valuable introductions to the volume and its four main sections: 'The African State'; 'The Political Economy of Development'; 'Elections, Democracy, and Representation'; and 'Africa and the World.' The editors' judicious selections highlight the changing concerns, conceptions, and perspectives that continue to animate Africanist scholarship. Readers of many stripes, whether upper-level students, scholars, or non-Africanists seeking a compact overview of recent works on contemporary African affairs, will be well rewarded for perusing this book. The editors' introductions alone are worth their attention.