The Elusive Agenda

Reviewing the progress achieved in making gender a central concern in the development progress, this book evaluates selected leading bilateral and multilateral donor agencies, including the World Bank, which have played a critical role in shaping the development agenda.

Dicklitch challenges the dominant discourse of neo-liberalism which places NGOs and civil society at the forefront of democratization and development in Africa. Based on nine months of field research in Uganda, the study draws on evidence from the 'successfully' liberalizing country and shows how NGO potential for democratization and development has been subverted by state directives, structural and historical conditions, as well as the internal limitations of NGOs.

This book questions the current status of the development agenda and examines why development has eluded large groups of people living in poverty. It argues that there is a general unwillingness to understand, and focus adequate attention on, the factors that explain the continued production of poverty and inequality. Development has also become increasingly buzzword-driven, although little effort is made to operationalise such terms for actual implementation on the ground. The book further highlights how development interventions have become largely synonymous with "crises" and why there is a need to refocus our attention on the less sensational, and often invisible, processes that perpetuate poverty. Based on a critical analysis of local, national and global efforts to promote social, economic and political development, the book focuses on a selected set of interrelated issues that form an integral part of the current development discourse: corruption, democracy, human rights, climate change and foreign aid. These are discussed on the basis of empirical evidence from South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Essays that use “gender as a critical lens for staging intersectional, multidisciplinary investigations of genocide in the 20th and 21st centuries” (Reading Religion). The genocides of modern history—Rwanda, Armenia, Guatemala, the Holocaust, and countless others—and their effects have been well documented, but how do the experiences of female victims and perpetrators differ from those of men? In Women and Genocide, human rights advocates and scholars come together to argue that the memory of trauma is gendered and that women’s voices and perspectives are key to our understanding of the dynamics that emerge in the context of genocidal violence. The contributors of this volume examine how women consistently are targets for the sexualized violence that serves as an instrument of ethnic cleansing, how female perpetrators take advantage of the new power structures, and how women are involved in the struggle for justice in post-genocidal contexts. By placing women at center stage, Women and Genocide helps us to better understand the nexus existing between misogyny and violence in societies where genocide erupts. “It elegantly bridges the historical divide between the study of political violence and the study of gendered violence in the so-called domestic sphere . . . Women and Genocide is an immense scholarly accomplishment that has the potential to fund creative advances in each of the scholarly disciplines it engages, as well as human rights, peace, and anti-violence programs of advocacy.” —Reading Religion

Africa faces several major development challenges that have adversely affected the political and material well being of the majority of the people living there. This collection of new essays rigorously analyzes those frontier development issues--including democracy, leadership, the economy, poverty alleviation through microfinance schemes, food security, education, health and political instability--and offers prescriptions that differ from the dominant neoliberal solutions.