Politics of Governance

Till Förster is Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He was a development expert and later associate professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cologne until 1996. He led the Africa Centre of the University of Bayreuth between 1996 and 2001 where he also co-directed a research axis of the interdisciplinary research programme on the causes and effects of globalisation in Africa. Till Förster has worked continually on questions of social, cultural and political transformations in Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon and in other parts of Africa and has a long publishing record on this and related themes.Lucy Koechlin is Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Basel, Switzerland. She works mainly on governance, political struggles, democratic spaces and urban politics in Eastern Africa. Until 2009 she was Head of Public Accountability at the Basel Institute of Governance, responsible for research and consultancies in the area of anti-corruption and accountability systems. Her publications include Corruption as an Empty Signifier: Politics and Political Order in Africa (Brill, 2013) and Non-state Actors as Standard Setters (ed. with Peters, A. et al., Cambridge University Press, 2009). She is also co-editor of the Basel Papers on Political Transformations.

• Introduction – The Conceptual Polysemy of Governance Lucy Koechlin Part I: Spaces and Struggles 1. Transformation and Struggle: Space in Africa Michael G. Schatzberg 2. Agency Across Changing Sites: The Path to Kenya's 2010 Constitution Nelson Kasfir Part II: Everyday Practices 3. Abandoning the Neo-Patrimonialist Paradigm: For a Pluralist Approach to the Bureaucratic Mode of Governance in Africa Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan 4. Between Governance and Domination: The Everyday Life of Uganda's Police Forces Sarah Biecker and Klaus Schlichte Part III: Emergence and Transformation 5. The Social Agency of Informal Settlers: A Case-Study of "Moonlight Houses" in Addis Ababa Alemmaya Mulugeta 6. Slow Activism and the Tactics of Legibility: A Case Study of the 2011 "Toilet Wars" and the Social Justice Coalition Steven Robins Part IV: Subjectivities and Articulations 7. Experiences of Violence and the Formation of the Political: Embodied Memory and Victimhood in South Africa Rita Kesselring 8. Imagining Otherwise: Dislocation, Subjectivity, and the Articulation of Political Demands Aletta Norval Part V: Conclusions 9. The Formation of Governance: The Politics of Governance and their Theoretical Dimensions Till Förster

Select Guide Rating