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1. Race Politics and Colonial Legacies: France, Africa and the Middle East

Author:
Hisham Aïdi, Marc Lynch, Zachariah Mampilly, Baba Adou, and Oumar Ba
Publication Date:
05-2024
Content Type:
Research Paper
Institution:
Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS)
Abstract:
In February 2020 – the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic – the Project on Middle East Political Science held a preliminary meeting at Columbia University in New York to explore the origins of the Africa-Middle East divides that treat North Africa as part of the Middle East and neglect states such as Sudan and Mauritania. Columbia was an appropriate place to begin such a dialogue. Two decades ago, when two of us (Aidi and Mampilly) were graduate students at Columbia, the Institute of African Studies was in serious crisis. The Ugandan political theorist Mahmood Mamdani arrived and launched an initiative to decolonize the study of Africa to counter Hegel’s partition of Africa by transcending the Saharan and red Sea divides, and by underscoring Africa’s links to Arabia, Asia and the New World. To that end, we co-organized a second conference on racial formations in Africa and the Middle East looking at race-making across these two regions comparatively, including the border zones often left out of both African and Middle Eastern Studies: the Sudans, Amazigh-speaking areas in the Sahel, Arabic speaking areas on the Swahili coast and Zanzibar. This workshop represents the third in our series of transregional studies across the Africa-Middle East divide.
Topic:
Politics, Post Colonialism, Race, History, Colonialism, Islamophobia, and Racialization
Political Geography:
Uganda, Africa, Europe, Sudan, Middle East, France, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia, Mauritania, and United States of America

2. A Genealogy of African Islamic Modernity

Author:
Wendell Hassan Marsh
Publication Date:
04-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
Center for Security, Race and Rights (CSRR), Rutgers University School of Law
Abstract:
African Islamic modernity is a discourse, a historical condition, and a project that highlights the entanglements of African racial identities, Islamic forms of life, and modernity as the globally hegemonic mode of social, economic, and political being. While there are many lineages by which one might trace the story of entanglement — situated differently in various locations, traditions, and contexts — the contemporary nation-state of Senegal is the ideal setting to think through these relationships. It is a space marked by a millennium of Islamic presence and over five centuries of integration in the global economy sequentially defined by the trans-Atlantic slave-trade, colonization, and neoliberal economic structural adjustment. It is also a space in which conflicting Africanist and Orientalist discourses have competed to represent a society that consistently escapes both constructions. Between and beyond these discourses, there is an important national discourse that narrates a story of modernity in three key episodes: 1) Islamic revolution that enshrines Islamic principles of governance, 2) anti-colonial messianism that carves out an autonomous space of Islamic economics, and 3) Racial accommodation in which the colonial state and Sufi orders negotiate the terms of the social contract. In this talk, I will show how these episodes together constitute a history of the present.
Topic:
Islam, Race, Religion, History, Hegemony, Colonialism, Discourse, and Modernity
Political Geography:
Africa and Senegal

3. RELIGION, ETHNICITY, AND CHARGES OF EXTREMISM: THE DYNAMICS OF INTER-COMMUNAL VIOLENCE IN ETHIOPIA

Author:
Terje Østebø, Jörg Haustein, Fasika Gedif, Muhammad Jemal Kadir, Kedir Jemal, and Yihenew Alemu Tesfaye
Publication Date:
01-2021
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
European Institute of Peace (EIP)
Abstract:
In recent months, the conflict in Tigray has dominated most analyses of Ethiopian politics. The scale of that crisis makes this understandable, but it remains important to keep analysing the inter-communal tensions and conflicts lines that had already emerged all over the country before the fighting in Tigray and continue to persist in parallel. This report addresses in particular the question of religiously motivated violence and its relationship with ethnic conflict. It analyses in detail two specific instances of inter-communal conflict that occurred in Mota (Amhara region) in December 2019 and in Shashemene (Oromia region) in July 2020. Both incidents might be seen as archetypical cases for inter-communal tensions and conflict motivated by religious (Mota) and ethnic (Shashemene) difference. Yet as the report will go on to show, these two aspects of collective identity formation are not clearly separate in Ethiopia but overlap and interact with one another in complex ways. This renders moot all mono-dimensional analyses of inter-communal conflict in Ethiopia, especially as different narratives compete in the interpretation of violence and its causes. Socio-economic variables undoubtedly play a role in defining the wider context, but the formation of communities, the genesis of conflict, and the circulation of interpretative narratives typically rest on references to ethnicity and religion. Given the current emphasis on ethnicity in Ethiopian politics, the role of religious affiliation is often overlooked, yet it is here that the accusation of “extremism” is most frequently and most consequentially raised. The report engages critically with such accusations and the corollary notion of rising religious extremism in Ethiopia. It will show, moreover, how the mere expectation or accusation of extremism has sufficed to generate inter-communal violence and deepened a climate of mistrust.
Topic:
Race, Violent Extremism, Ethnicity, Violence, and Countering Violent Extremism
Political Geography:
Africa and Ethiopia

4. Racial Formations in Africa and the Middle East: A Transregional Approach

Author:
Hisham Aïdi, Marc Lynch, Zachariah Mampilly, Diana S. Kim, Parisa Vaziri, Denis Regnier, Sean Jacobs, Wendell Marsh, Stephen J. King, Eric Hahonou, Paul A. Silverstein, Afifa Ltifi, Zeyad el Nabolsy, Bayan Abubakr, Yasmin Moll, Zachary Mondesire, Abdourahmane Seck, Amelie Le Renard, Sumayya Kassamali, Noori Lori, Nathaniel Mathews, Sabria Al-Thawr, Gokh Amin Alshaif, Deniz Duruiz, Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Efrat Yerday, Noah Salomon, and Ann McDougall
Publication Date:
09-2021
Content Type:
Research Paper
Institution:
Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS)
Abstract:
In February 2020, the editors of this volume organized a POMEPS workshop that explored the origins of the disciplinary divide between the study of Africa and the Middle East, examining issues that span both regions (i.e., cross-border conflict, Islamist politics, social movements and national identity, and Gulf interventionism.) In February 2021, we convened another workshop, sponsored by POMEPS and the newly-founded Program on African Social Research (PASR, pronounced Pasiri) centered on racial formations and racialization across the two regions. Both workshops centered around the need for a genuinely transregional scholarship, one which rejects artificial divisions between ostensibly autonomous regions while also taking seriously the distinctive historical trajectories and local configurations of power which define national and subregional specificities. The workshop brought together nearly two dozen scholars from across multiple disciplines to explore the historical and contemporary politics of racial formation across Africa and the Middle East.
Topic:
Islam, Race, War, Immigration, Law, Slavery, Judaism, Colonialism, Borders, Identity, and Amazigh
Political Geography:
Africa, Sudan, Turkey, Middle East, Asia, South Africa, Yemen, Palestine, North Africa, Egypt, Madagascar, Tunisia, Oman, and Gulf Nations

5. Exploring economic support networks amidst racial inequality in Namibia

Author:
Annalena Oppel
Publication Date:
06-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
United Nations University
Abstract:
Community or interpersonal support as a critical source of livelihood sustenance in the Global South can exhibit unequal dynamics. An understanding of these practices is primarily tied to the conceptual space of poverty or small communities. Less is known about how social support systems might respond to structural inequalities. I address this by exploring how support practices might be shaped by inequalities in the Namibian context. I draw on primary network data to assess inequality as a social dynamic within the space of support and evaluate whether providing worse-off others corresponds to former discriminatory practices under the apartheid regime. My results suggest that inequality has normalized a sense of support as necessity for black but not white Namibians. More broadly, by recognizing differences in group practices, I evidence that exploring support practices across structural inequalities can enhance insights on the social replication of inter- and intragroup-based inequalities.
Topic:
Economics, Race, Inequality, and Social Networks
Political Geography:
Africa and Namibia

6. Rise and Fall of Jacob Zuma

Author:
Vladimir Shubin
Publication Date:
06-2018
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
AUSTRAL: Brazilian Journal of Strategy International Relations
Institution:
Postgraduate Program in International Strategic Studies, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
Abstract:
In May 2014 I suddenly received a telephone call from the South African Embassy in Moscow, then an official invitation signed by Jacob Zuma followed: he wanted me to be present at his second inauguration. Unfortunately I failed to do it, I was still recovering from a surgical operation, but the very fact was significant, not because I had been involved, but because it symbolized friendly relations that existed between the South African president and those in Russia who took part in supporting the long struggle against the apartheid regime.
Topic:
Apartheid, Diplomacy, International Cooperation, and Race
Political Geography:
Africa, Russia, Europe, and South Africa

7. Who’s asking? Interviewer Coethnicity Effects in African Survey Data

Author:
Claire L. Adida, Karen E. Ferree, Daniel Posner, and Amanda Lea Robinson
Publication Date:
06-2015
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Afrobarometer
Abstract:
Face-to-face interviews constitute a social interaction between interviewer and respondent, yet research employing African survey data typically fails to account for the effect of shared ethnicity on survey responses. We find that respondents give systematically different answers to coethnic and non-coethnic interviewers across surveys in 14 African countries, but with significant variation in the degree of bias across question types and countries, with the largest effects for explicitly ethnic questions and in countries where ethnicity is salient. In South Africa, we show further variation across interviewer-respondent dyad type: Coracial effects are larger than coethnic effects – a pattern consistent with the salience of racial legacies in South Africa – and differences in the direction, size, and significance of these effects concord with dyad-specific social desirability. Our findings have practical implications for consumers of African survey data and underscore the context dependence of the social interaction that constitutes the survey experience.
Topic:
Race, Public Opinion, Ethnicity, Interview, and Survey
Political Geography:
Africa and South Africa

8. South Africa’s Emerging Black Middle Class: A Harbinger of Political Change?

Author:
Robert Mattes
Publication Date:
12-2014
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Afrobarometer
Abstract:
South Africa has seen a significant increase in the size of its black middle class in the post-apartheid period, but the attitudinal consequences of indicators of the middle class, as of 2011, are inconsistent and modest in size. While members of the middle class are no more likely to hold democratic values than other black South Africans, they are more likely to want government to secure higher-order, rather than basic, survival needs. They are less likely to identify with the governing African National Congress, to turn out to vote, or to voice their concerns by contacting officials or joining collective action. At the same time, intra-class racial differences between middle-class black respondents, on one hand, and middle-class white, coloured, and Indian respondents, on the other, are still substantial.
Topic:
Race, Inequality, Diversity, Class, and Middle Class
Political Geography:
Africa and South Africa

9. Full Issue

Author:
Mojúbàolú Olufúnké Okome
Publication Date:
12-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Ìrìnkèrindò: A Journal of African Migration
Institution:
Ìrìnkèrindò: a Journal of African Migration
Abstract:
CONTENTS Editorial — Faith Wambura Ngunjiri……………………………………………………………1 Articles The Promise and Perils of Diaspora Partnerships: The Case of the U.S.-Based Liberian Diaspora — Osman Antwi-Boateng…………………………………………………………………………6 The Political Economy of Forced Economic Migration in Nigeria: Prospects and Challenges in the New Millennium — Shambhavi V. Murthy Gopalkrishna and Samuel O. Oloruntoba……..41 Racial Differences in the Tempo of Assimilation for White and Black African-Born in the United States — Stephanie J. Nawyn……………………………………………………………………69 Poetry Ghosts of our Past, Echo our Future — Jackie Copeland-Carson…………………...………….91
Topic:
Migration, Political Economy, Race, Diaspora, Refugees, Assimilation, and Forced Migration
Political Geography:
Africa, Liberia, Nigeria, and United States of America

10. Full Issue

Author:
Mojúbàolú Olufúnké Okome
Publication Date:
12-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Ìrìnkèrindò: A Journal of African Migration
Institution:
Ìrìnkèrindò: a Journal of African Migration
Abstract:
CONTENTS Articles Omolúàbí: The Way of Human Being: An African Philosophy’s Impact on Nigerian Voluntary Immigrants’ Educational and Other Life Aspirations — Dolapo Adeniji-Neill................. 1 Liberian Immigrants in Rhode Island: The Trauma, the Bliss, and the Dilemma — P. Khalil Saucier, Ph.D.................................................................................................................... 29 Why Maine? Secondary Migration Decisions of Somali Refugees — Kimberly A. Huisman..... 55 “'Yo, Jose Dupard, pardo libre natural y vecino de esta ciudad': Masculinity, Race and Respectability in Spanish New Orleans — Megan Kareithi ............................................ 99 Economic Impact of Immigration on African Americans — Stacey-Ann Wilson, Ph.D............ 128 The African Immigrant Family in the United States of America: Challenges and Opportunities — Sulayman S. Nyang ......................................................................................................... 150 Art Papers Afrikea (2009) — Adejoke Tugbiyele ......................................................................................... 172 Altar and the Throne: The Last Fuck and the Sweet Taste of Victory (2010) — Adejoke Tugbiyele ........................................................................................................................ 176 Gèlèdé Tupperware Party — Adejoke Tugbiyele........................................................................ 179 Opinions Blacklisting of Nigeria as the New Den of Terrorists? The Perspective of a Nigerian Student in the U.K. — Olugu Ukpai ................................................................................................ 184 Poetry Lamentations to Oluorogbo — Ademola Araoye........................................................................ 213
Topic:
Economics, Education, Migration, Race, Terrorism, Immigration, Refugees, Philosophy, Family, Masculinity, and Poetry
Political Geography:
Africa, Liberia, Nigeria, Somalia, and United States of America