Why hasn’t polygamous marriage died out in African cities, as experts once expected it would? Enduring Polygamy considers this question in one of Africa’s fastest-growing cities: Bamako, the capital of Mali, where one in four wives is in a polygamous marriage. Using polygamy as a lens through which to survey sweeping changes in urban life, it offers ethnographic and demographic insights into the customs, gender norms and hierarchies, kinship structures, and laws affecting marriage...

In cities throughout Africa, local inhabitants live alongside large populations of "strangers." Bruce Whitehouse explores the condition of strangerhood for residents who have come from the West African Sahel to settle in Brazzaville, Congo. Whitehouse considers how these migrants live simultaneously inside and outside of Congolese society as merchants, as Muslims in a predominantly non-Muslim society, and as parents seeking to instill in their children the customs of their communities of o...

Critics of President Obama have attacked him as a socialist, an African-American radical, a big government liberal. But somehow the critics have failed to reveal what's truly driving Barack Obama. Now bestselling author Dinesh D’Souza throws out these misplaced attacks in his new book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage. The reason, explains D'Souza, that Obama appears to be working to destroy America from within is found, as Obama himself admits, in "The Dreams of His Father": a deeply-ho...

The Trouble with the Congo suggests a new explanation for international peacebuilding failures in civil wars. Drawing from more than 330 interviews and a year and a half of field research, it develops a case study of the international intervention during the Democratic Republic of the Congo's unsuccessful transition from war to peace and democracy (2003–6). Grassroots rivalries over land, resources, and political power motivated widespread violence. However, a dominant peacebuilding cultur...

Winner of the Award for Excellence in Government and Political Science (AAP)The Rwandan genocide has become a touchstone for debates about the causes of mass violence and the responsibilities of the international community. Yet a number of key questions about this tragedy remain unanswered: How did the violence spread from community to community and so rapidly engulf the nation? Why did individuals make decisions that led them to take up machetes against their neighbors? And what w...

Natural resources like oil and minerals are the largest source of unaccountable power in the world. Petrocrats like Putin and the Saudis spend resource money on weapons and oppression; militants in Iraq and in the Congo spend resource money on radicalization and ammunition. Resource-fueled authoritarians and extremists present endless crises to the West-and the source of their resource power is ultimately ordinary consumers, doing their everyday shopping at the gas station and the mall. In...

Spontaneous and creative protest movements have burst onto the political stage in Canada and around the world. Joel D. Harden, an activist, writer, and educator, offers a ground-level account of the most important of these recent expressions of large-scale political engagement, mostly by young people. Based on first-hand accounts from many of the participants and organizers, Harden describes key events and turning-points -- in Canada and beyond -- from the viewpoint of a committed insider....

Humanitarian groups have failed, Fiona Terry believes, to face up to the core paradox of their activity: humanitarian action aims to alleviate suffering, but by inadvertently sustaining conflict it potentially prolongs suffering. In Condemned to Repeat?, Terry examines the side-effects of intervention by aid organizations and points out the need to acknowledge the political consequences of the choice to give aid. The author makes the controversial claim that aid agencies act as though the ...

Today, American sovereignty is more challenged than ever before, not from enemies that threaten us militarily but from friends” who urge us to share or reduce our sovereignty for larger global objectives. How Barack Obama is Endangering our National Sovereignty reveals what sovereignty means to Americans, not as an abstraction but as a vibrant component of self government.Former Ambassador to the U.N. John R. Bolton looks at specific threats to U.S. sovereignty, from global gover...

Human rights is an important issue in contemporary politics, and the last few decades have also seen a remarkable increase in research and teaching on the subject. This book introduces students to the study of human rights and aims to build on their interest while simultaneously offering an alternative vision of the subject. Many texts focus on the theoretical and legal issues surrounding human rights. This book adopts a substantially different approach which uses empirical data derived fr...

Endowed with natural resources, majestic bodies of fresh water, and a relatively mild climate, the Great Lakes region of Central Africa has also been the site of some of the world's bloodiest atrocities. In Rwanda, Burundi, and the Congo-Kinshasa, decades of colonial subjugation—most infamously under Belgium's Leopold II—were followed by decades of civil warfare that spilled into neighboring countries. When these conflicts lead to horrors such as the 1994 Rwandan genocide, ethnic differenc...

We take you on a discovery of the root causes of African conflicts; the attempts by continental organizations such as the Organization of African Unity to resolve these conflicts; the reasons for the inability of the OAU/AU to succeed in conflict resolution; the root causes of the Burundi Conflict; the Burundi Peace process as a reflection of how conflicts are resolved in Africa and why we think it does not lead to sustainable peace which we term negative peace.Burundis Negative Pe...