This article surveys recent literature on Africa and International Relations (IR) and reviews
the current place of Africa within the discipline. It notes that critical debates continue around …

World-systems analysis has developed rapidly over the past thirty years. Today's students
and junior scholars come to world-systems analysis as a well-established approach …

This article examines the rise of various representations of postcolonial states to highlight
how thinking and practice that arose and prevailed during the Cold War still persists in the …

In this paper we evaluate the impact of colonialism on development in Sub-Saharan Africa.
In the world context, colonialism had very heterogeneous effects, operating through many …

This article challenges existing analyses of state failure and their casting of African societies
in the role of deviant Other to those of Western Europe and North America. Drawing on …

The first part of this article sketches the ideal-type of the territorially consolidated, sovereign
nation-state. The second part discusses how the assumptions of “homogeneity,”“unity,” and …

This paper is a critical interrogation of the dominant Africanist discourse on African state
forms and its relationship with what is seen as pervasive state failure on the continent …

The competing theories of state recognition and their failings actively demonstrate that
recognition of a state does not have any normative content per se, but rather, that the rules of …

Nigeria has long been stalked by failure. From the moment it achieved independence its
demise was predicted. Its name was not coined until the late nineteenth century and was not …

The adoption of democratic decentralization across the developing world has been critiqued
by scholars and practitioners for both macro-level institutional shortcomings and, on a more …