Published: August 1, 2022

Published: April 24, 2023

This issue of the Bulletin comes out at a time when Africa’s approach to foreign relations in an increasingly multipolar world is under scrutiny. The Russia–Ukraine war, nearing its fourth month, has gripped the attention of the world. The future is, as a consequence, being discussed in terms of the outcome of the war and how this outcome will shape it. Western countries have done their best, through the Western media, to propagate a narrative of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’ about the war. This has been done in an attempt to mo- bilise the rest of the world to take sides and perceive the war through the lens of Euro-American hegemony. But the efforts at mobilisation have not been very successful. For Africa, in particular, the responses have been divided, with many countries voting in favour of Ukraine but certainly not buying the overall Western propaganda in which criticism of Russia is cast. Thus, the February vote at the UN General Assembly saw twenty-eight African countries voting in favour of the resolution to condemn the Russian invasion, but seventeen abstaining and one, Eritrea, voting in favour of Russia. It has not been lost to observers that some African countries did not take an outright position during the UN vote. A review of those who abstained shows that they are predominantly countries that Russia supported during the Cold War and in their wars of independence from white settler regimes and apartheid. Read the Full Editorial

Published: June 15, 2022

Over the last two years, political life in West Africa has been disrupted by what some have de- scribed as the ‘return of military coups in Africa’. Between 2020 and 2022, military-staged coups took place in Mali, Chad, Niger, Guinea, Sudan and Burkina Faso. To some observers, this was a return to familiar African ways. The period 2000 to 2020 appears to them to have been only an interlude that eventually had to give way to events in Africa that, by their very nature, test the promise of multiparty politics and neo- liberal economic reforms for democracy and development. The return of coups, especially in the West Africa region, suggests the failure of multipartyism and neo- liberal interventions to deliver on citizens’ expectations for democracy and economic development. Read the Full Editorial

Published: May 30, 2022

Over the last three decades or so, a number of scholars op- erating under the auspices of CODESRIA, and later UNRISD, have dedicated their energies and time to rescuing social policy in Af- rica from external policy manipula- tion and intellectual assault. The as- sault manifested itself in the form of reductionist neoliberal approaches that questioned the role of state in de- velopment generally and the idea and practice of social policy in particular. The external assault reduced the dis- course on development privileging market forces as the key to allocation of public goods. In this scenario, the broad meaning and context of social policy in a developmet context was emptied and reduced to a mere ‘social protection’ function. Read the Full Editorial 

Published: December 18, 2021

This issue of the Bulletin focuses on the West African region, and specifically on ongoing attempts by the political leadership of the countries of the region to establish a common curren- cy. The region presents both political and economic complexity, punctuated by cycles of turbulence manifesting, for example, in the form of extended periods of terror, inter- and intra-regional conflicts and, more recently, periodic public health challenges in the form of the Ebola epidemic and now the coronavirus pandemic. Some of this turbulence has historical origins, especially in the interrupted processes of state-building and subsequent legacies of colonial rule, that have either combined with or accentuated extreme ecological realities that periodically boil over to worsen matters. The region is indeed subject to climatic extremities, and emergencies resulting from this have affected not just everyday livelihoods but have also undermined key productive sectors in region. Read the Full Editorial

Published: December 8, 2021

The articles in this issue of the Bulletin engage with recent trends in politics and development in Africa. They are organised around three thematic concerns and a book symposium. The first theme, addressed in ’Funmi Olonisakin’s article, frames the Pan-African context of Africa’s recent democratisation, peace and security dynamics. The second focuses generally on African poli- tics, and includes articles by Peter Any- ang’ Nyong’o and Issa Shivji, the former discussing the role of political parties in democratisation and development and the latter examining the legacy of the just- ended regime of John Pombe Joseph Ma- gufuli in Tanzania. The third, represented by Jìmí O. Adésínà’s piece, looks at social policy and the potential transformative lessons that can be learned from the Co- vid-19 experience in Africa. The final part of this Bulletin, containing four pieces, is made up of essays that form a symposium on Mahmood Mamdani’s recent book, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities. Each of these concerns deals with a spe- cific theme but collectively they reinforce the key argument about politics, identity and development that is advanced in this issue of the Bulletin. Read the Full Editorial

Published: August 30, 2021

The history and legacy of Pan-Africanism, as a movement for the emancipation of Africans, is alive and strong, having overcome numerous challenges. Rooted in the foundation laid by seminal actors, such as Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Julius Nyerere and Kwame Nkrumah, the ideals of Pan- Africanism have remained open to embrace by successive generations. Evidence of the movement’s strength and regeneration emerges periodically across global Africa, when widely publicised grave abuse, violence or oppression of black people catalyses sustained protest. Often, the power of the response is evident in the fact that a plurality of people, in diverse and distant parts of the world, are galvanised into action to forge united rebuttals against such oppressive conditions through various means (including, in the present mo- ment, virtual platforms). Often, the result has been a tactical retreat of the oppressive forces, via miniscule reforms—a grudging acknowledgement of the wrongs against black peoples that is, however, generally followed by a return to life that is more or less the same. In other words, the status quo is maintained, and the cycle repeats over and over again. Read the Full Editorial

Published: June 15, 2021

This issue of CODESRIA Bulletin, the first for 2021, is released after a year that saw the global structures of knowledge production and dissemination disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Africa has so far defied the grim predictions that prophesied immense numbers of fatalities on the continent. The spectre of poor Africans dropping dead every- where has refused to materialise. However, the pandemic is not over yet, and we know that its adverse effects on socioeconomic and political life on the continent, as elsewhere, are already alarming and will be felt for some time to come. CODESRIA has not been spared the impact. The Council’s execution of its intellectual activities in 2020 was affected at the level of regular pro- gramming, especially given that higher education institutions, which are focal points for most of the Council’s activities, were shut across the continent and the cessation of travel allowed for little or no fieldwork for research. Read the Full Editorial

Published: April 3, 2021

This double issue focuses on the situation in Mali, a country that has faced decades of violence and instability since gaining independence from France in 1960. Since January 2020, Mali has witnessed a series of attacks by various “Jihadists” groups and internal political instability that finally led to a coup and the overthrow of President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta in August 2020. The decades of violence and instability in Mali have often drawn the intervention of external actors in ways that have raised the significant question of the nature of the state in Africa and its social contract with citizens. This is of concern not only to Mali. The articles in this Bulletin clearly illustrate that in a world that is increasingly interconnected, where an eruption in one corner easily becomes a reverberating disruption elsewhere, we cannot but see the recent coup in Mali as a national crisis with wider regional consequences. By far the most important dimension to this is that Mali has been a playground of numerous foreign interests that at times trump those of regional and local actors. The contentions between European powers on the one hand and ECOWAS and AU on the other hand is a case in point. Read the Full Editorial

Published: December 16, 2020