Urban Africa Book Series: Call for proposals .
The International African Institute (IAI) and UCL Press welcome proposals for the new jointly published Urban Africa Book Series.
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Launching in 2022, Africa Bibliography, Research and Documentation brings together essay content from Africa Bibliography, the authoritative guide to works in African studies published under the auspices of the International African Institute annually since 1984, with the former African Research & Documentation, the journal of SCOLMA (the UK Libraries and Archives Group on Africa) published since 1973.

Rift Valley Institute · Book Launch: When Peace Kills Politics

African Arguments book series now published with Hurst

From 2021, the African Arguments book series is being published with Hurst. For further details, see Hurst Publishers.

Debating ideas
Debating Ideas is a new section that aims to reflect the values and editorial ethos of the African Arguments book series, publishing writing from within the African continent and beyond. It will offer debates and engagements, contexts and controversies, and reviews and responses flowing from the African Arguments books. Edited and managed by the International African Institute. Host: SOAS University of London. Sponsored by the World Peace Foundation. Go to the Debating ideas web page >>

Pandemic Kinship: Families, Intervention, and Social Change in Botswana's Time of AIDS
Koreen M. Reece
Shaped around the stories of one extended family, their friends, neighbours, and community, Pandemic Kinship provides an intimate portrait of everyday life in Botswana's time of AIDS. It challenges assumptions about a 'crisis of care' unfolding in the wake of the pandemic, showing that care - like other aspects of Tswana kinship - is routinely in crisis, and that the creative ways families navigate such crises make them kin. In Setswana, conflict and crisis are glossed as dikgang, and negotiating dikgang is an ethical practice that generates and reorients kin relations over time. Governmental and non-governmental organisations often misread the creativity of crisis, intervening in ways that may prove more harmful than the problems they set out to solve. Moving between family discussions, community events, and the daily work of orphan care projects and social work offices, Pandemic Kinship provides provocative insights into how we manage change in pandemic times.

Published for the IAI by Cambridge University Press
ISBN 9781009193474, October 2022

Conflict Minerals, Inc: War, Profit and White Saviourism in Eastern Congo
Christoph N. Vogel
Have international efforts to regulate resource extraction from war zones in the DRC done more harm than good? In the twenty-first century, the relationship between violent conflict and natural resources has become a matter of intense public and academic debate. As a result of fervent activism and international campaigning, the flagship case of ‘conflict minerals’ has captured global attention. This term groups together the artisanal tin, tantalum (coltan), tungsten and gold originating from war zones in Central Africa. ogel demonstrates how Western advocacy and policy have relied on colonial frames to drive change, and how White Saviourism perpetuates structural violence and inequality across global supply and value chains.

Published for the International African Institute by Hurst Publishers
ISBN: 9781787387065, 224pp, April 2022

Learning Morality, Inequalities, and Faith: Christian and Muslim Schools in Tanzania
Hansjörg Dilger

Christian and Muslim schools have become important target points in families and pupils' quests for new study opportunities and securing a 'good life' in Tanzania. These schools combine secular education with the moral (self-)formation of young people, triggering new realignments of the fields of education with interreligious co-existence and class formation in the country's urban centres. Hansjörg Dilger explores the emerging entanglements of faith, morality, and the educational market in Dar es Salaam, thereby shedding light on processes of religious institutionalisation and their individual and collective embodiment. By contextualising these dynamics through analysis of the politics of Christian-Muslim relations in postcolonial Tanzania, this book shows how the field of education has shaped the positions of these highly diverse religious communities in diverging ways. In doing so, Dilger suggests that students and teachers' religious experience and practice in faith-oriented schools are shaped by the search for socio-moral belonging as well as by the power relations and inequalities of an interconnected world.

Published for the IAI by Cambridge University Press

ISBN 9781316514221, 242pp, March 2022

Decolonizing Heritage: Time to Repair in Senegal
Ferdinand De Jong

Senegal features prominently on the UNESCO World Heritage List. As many of its cultural heritage sites are remnants of the French empire, how does an independent nation care for the heritage of colonialism? How does it re-interpret slave barracks, colonial museums, and monuments to empire to imagine its own national future? This book examines Senegal's decolonisation of its cultural heritage. Revealing how Léopold Sédar Senghor's philosophy of Négritude inflects the interpretation of its colonial heritage, Ferdinand De Jong demonstrates how Senegal's reinterpretation of heritage sites allows it to overcome the legacies of the slave trade, colonialism and empire. Remembering and reclaiming a Pan-African future, De Jong shows how World Heritage sites are conceived as the archive of an Afrotopia to come, and, in a move towards decolonisation, how they re-appropriate time to repair the wounds of colonialism.

Published for the IAI by Cambridge University Press

ISBN 9781316514535, 242pp, February 2022