Ethnicity And Nationalism In Africa

Hameso seeks an alternative to the western style state nations that were imposed in Africa during colonialism and are currently being pushed heavily by the west while the real world is increasingly dominated by undemocratic transnational corporations. He describes the failure of territory-based mirrors of Europe in Zaire, Kenya, Somalia and other countries, and proposes the multitude of existing ethnic nations as the basis for stable society. Some of the material is repeated from his earlier book. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Ethnicity and Nationalism in Africa features a series of 'constructivist' contributions by leading scholars in the field of ethnicity and nationalism, and explores the differences among those who have come to be known as 'constructivists'. The contributors reflect upon ongoing methodological debates in ethnography, historiography, and political theory. They demonstrate the diversity of concepts and methods within constructivism, and assess the political implications of the concepts themselves. The debate between them is inter-disciplinary, critical and innovative, and should be of value to anyone interested in the study of ethnicity and nationalism.

The politics of identity and ethnicity will remain a fundamental characteristic of African modernity. For this reason, historians and anthropologists have joined political scientists in a discussion about the ways in which democracy can develop in multicultural societies. In Ethnicity and Democracy in Africa, the contributors address why ethnicity represents a political problem, how the problem manifests itself, and which institutional models offer ways of ameliorating the challenges that ethnicity poses to democratic nation-building.

The fifteen essays written for this volume reflect the increasing importance for social scientists of ethnic, rather than physical or tribal, criteria for classifying modern population groups. The authors—from South Africa, the United States, South West Africa (Namibia), Nigeria, and Scotland—cover most of Africa south of the Sahara. They consider the range from large national population groupings to small-scale societies attempting to maintain their social boundaries, and discuss such topics as emergent nationalism, ethnic divisiveness, social distance, voluntary association, and the role of women. The first section is concerned with particular communities, peoples, and ethnic groups, and treats traditional tribal groupings as well as communities delineated on phenotypic grounds. In the second section, the focus turns to modern situations of interaction; the two major themes discussed here are situational ethnicity and situational realignment. The third section deals with color, one of the physical criteria of ethnic identification; here the authors discuss the political and legal implications of a system based on color. The last essay reports on current changes in attitude and organization within the countries of white-ruled southern Africa.

Identifies 'backwardness', social segregation, elite manipulation and mass demand for change as the main causes of ethnic conflict.

This examination of the politics of ethnicity and nation-building in Africa stresses the trend towards subnationalist autonomy and away from a singular, state-centric system based on the Western model. Forrest ranges across the continent to explore a variety of subnational movements.

Dr. Jacquin-Berdal has given us a cogent and lucid defence of a modernist international relations perspective on nationalism. In contrast to current preoccupations with ethnicity, she demonstrates, through a rich and detailed empirical analysis of Eritrea and Somaliland separatism that the colonial territorial state provided the causal basis and motor for the rise of these and other African nationalisms. This book is an important and timely contribution to the theoretical literature on nationalism and to our understanding of contemporary politics in the Horn of Africa. It is important for two reasons. First, since the end of the cold war, the proposition that nations - and hence successful nation-states - invariably spring from an ethnic core has too often gone unchallenged. Those who hold this position tend to regard it almost as a self-evident truth. As Dominique Jacquin-Berdal's analysis impressively demonstrates, it is not. Secondly, most students of nationalism, whether they insist on the ethnic ancestry of the modern nation, or view it as an essentially modern construct, implicitly agree that the roots of the nation and nationalism lie within society rather than outside it. S