The Rwandan government have ambitious yet deeply disruptive plans to rebuild Kigali as Africa's Singapore. Despite plans to uproot vast swathes of the city to make way for 'virtual Kigali', the response by ordinary city-dwellers has been one of striking silence.
State ambitions to build a 'global' Dakar alongside a proliferation of diaspora-financed luxury development, highlights the fraught nature of belonging in a city where everyday life is marked by migration, economic reform and inequality.
The reality is that the entire range of Kenya's democratic institutions is in crisis. The weight of the state was brought to bear on this election in a way never seen before.
The two and a half weeks between January 25 and February 11, 2011 proved that in Egypt there is a strong demand for social, political and economic justice, and that the established political elites – religious or secular – are badly out of step with those aspirations.
This year's 41st anniversary, celebrated two weeks ago, has been marked in particularly gloomy fashion. Reports have recently emerged floating the prospect of oil reserves drying up and arguing that new discoveries are failing to keep pace with production. This might well turn out to be the best n
Such a division over bodies stands in dialectical relationship to the division of the body politic in the country. It is a result of a polarized polity and the visible expression of it at the same time.
The announcement of the long awaited new government in Tunisia coincided with International Women‘s Day. Ironically, only 3 women were appointed in the new cabinet. The exclusion of women from key posts in the government is not a new phenomenon in the history of modern Tunisia.
By blackmailing the state and disrupting crucial legislative work, protesters are doing more to harm to the aims of the revolution than probably even the most diehard Gaddafi supporter could manage at this moment in time.
In this crucial post-revolutionary period where a vacuum is waiting to be filled, no one, on either side of the political paradigm, is emerging to the fore.
The displays of masculine assertiveness by the football ultras in Egypt and their strongly gendered form of youth activism points to the need to look beyond clichés about unspecified notions of revolutionary youth. Initially opposed to state authorities, are the ultras refashioning themselves as n
Film: In this series of short films Burundian women look at key issues in the wake of the civil war, which ended in 2005. More than 1 million Burundians were internally displaced or forced to flee the country as a result of the 12-year civil conflict which killed over 300,000 people.
Many evolving disputes in north Africa and the Sahara fuse religious language and political impulse to powerful effect, says Stephen Ellis.
