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When Victims Become Killers

When Victims Become Killers

Mahmoud Mamdani should be on every essential reading list, whether that is African Studies (with When Victims Become Killers), colonialism and colonization (with Citizen and Subject) or political science (with Good Muslim, Bad Muslim). For anyone interested in Rwanda, the genocide, colonization and identity, When Victims Become Killers (2001) is required reading. A detailed history […]

Tags: #Genocide #Mahmoud Mamdani #Politics #Rwanda #When Victims Become Killers

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Participatory Development Practice

Participatory Development Practice

Book review: Kelly, Anthony and Westoby, Peter. 2018: Participatory Development Practice: Using Traditional and Contemporary Frameworks. There is an emerging recognition that many of the ideas, practices and approaches within development studies and practice can replicate colonial attitudes, be paternalistic and disempowering, and may entrench marginalization. The emergence of a wide array of participatory methodologies […]

Tags: #Development Practice #Development Studies #Gandhi #Participation #Participatory Development Practice

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The Liberal Virus

The Liberal Virus

For additional background on Samir Amin see my posts on Unequal Development (1976) and Capitalism in the Age of Globalization (1997). Some notes from his 2004 book “The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World”: “Towards the end of the twentieth century a sickness struck the world. Not everyone died, but all […]

Tags: #Americanization #Globalization #Liberal Virus #Liberalism #Samir Amin

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Capitalism in the Age of Globalization

Capitalism in the Age of Globalization

Samir Amin (1931-2018) spent his life research, writing and acting against capitalism, in particular highlighting how exploitative is it for the peripheries of the system. On this, Unequal Development (1976), is one of the earlier important works. In its place, he advocated for a socialist system. In the 1970s he introduced the term “eurocentrism”, a […]

Tags: #Capitalism #Globalization #Intellectual Property #Samir Amin #Trade

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Critique of Black Reason

Critique of Black Reason

Achille Mbembe is a Cameroonian philosophy, based at WistU in South Africa. He has authored a number of influential works (such as Necropolitics), but given the importance of his works, is not as widely read and taught as he should be. Fortunately for English readers, his two recent books have been translated by published by […]

Tags: #Achille Mbembe #Critique of Black Reason #Fanon #Race #Racism

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Who Owns the Problem?

Who Owns the Problem?

A common theme of the lectures Pius Adesanmi gave was on narrative ownership. Much is said about Africa, but those stories often are crafted elsewhere. That is not to say that Africans do not produce narrative, he also shows, but that such narratives do not transverse the global wires as the others do, and thereby […]

Tags: #African Studies #Pius Adesanmi #Who Owns the Problem?

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