Permanent Emergency Welfare Regimes in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Exclusive Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy

This book examines the relationship between development economics, social protection and democratization in the specific context of Sub-Saharan Africa. Moving existing theories of transformation into a new terrain, it sheds light on the exclusive origins of dictatorship and democracy. The book explains how development, social protection and democracy-enhancing policies have been produced by existing institutional frameworks and contingent responses to emergency events, and that these have themselves been shaped by the actions of actors and by their embeddedness in the surrounding political, economic, cultural and social environment. The book also draws attention to the most relevant institutional and social mechanisms, with associated elite strategies and power politics relations in the creation of politically-induced conflicts. In doing so, it highlights the important role of welfare institutions in the reduction and reproduction of vertical and horizontal inequalities as well as their repercussion in the emergence of social conflicts.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Permanent Emergency Welfare Regimes in Sub-Saharan Africa 1. Theoretical Framework: Democracy, System Transformation and Welfare Regimes PART I: KEY ISSUES AND PARAMETERS 2. Pathways of Development 3. Systemic Problems and Structural Challenges 4. Poverty and Human Development PART II: SOCIAL PROTECTION 5. Labour Market, Poverty Relief and Health 6. Education, Child Protection, and Gender Equality 7. Hunger, Food Security, Safe Water and Sanitation PART III: SOCIAL CONFLICTS, MODERNIZATION AND DEMOCRATIZATION 8. Social Conflicts and the Politics of Inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa 9. Democratization and Consolidation of Democratic Institutions Conclusions: The Exclusive Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy

About the Author :
Alfio Cerami has been Research Associate at the Centre d'etudes europeennes at Sciences Po, France and an international consultant for the UNICEF. He has also held appointments at University of Erfurt, Germany, at the Centre for German and European Studies of the State University of St Petersburg, Russia and at Southern Methodist University in Paris, France. His research concentrates on how political, economic, and social transformations influence the process of democratization and of consolidation of democratic institutions.

Review :
"Alfio Cerami makes us painfully aware of the pivotal importance of wide-ranging social welfare programs for democratization projects everywhere. He deftly demonstrates how 'emergency welfare regimes' produce different outcomes in diverging contexts of Sub-Saharan Africa and offers valuable theoretical insights that would be of great interest to scholars, policy experts, international NGOs, and a growing number of students of this long-neglected region." - Tomasz Inglot, Professor in Political Science, Minnesota State University, USA "Welfare state studies only rarely embrace the development of social policy in Africa. In this highly stimulating book Cerami not only shows how to describe and understand Sub-Saharan permanent emergent welfare regimes, he is also able to demonstrate the necessity of combining insight from a variety of approaches including welfare state analysis and political science, but also to combine it with enormous insight into pitfalls and dilemmas for Africa's development, and suggestions for future path-ways." - Bent Greve, Professor in Welfare State Analysis, University of Roskilde, Denmark "A milestone. This study sheds not only vivid light on a largely blind spot of the welfare regime research hitherto. It also connects the broad empirical analysis on Sub-Saharan Africa with an ambitious concept building on the nexus of development economics, social protection and democratization. Alfio Cerami's profound study reveals once again the close relationship between public welfare and the conditio humana in contemporary societies-wherever they are located." - Raj Kollmorgen, Associate Professor in Sociology, University of Magdeburg, Germany