David Seddon - search results

For most commentators and scholars, it was only events in the Global North that constituted ‘Global 1968’. None of the relevant overviews brings related events on the African continent to the fore. In a detailed account of popular protest across Africa in the 1960s, it becomes clear that the decade was vital for activists – as it was elsewhere across the world. 1968 was a crucial year for popular protests and student militancy on the continent. roape.net begins to fill in the blanks in the story of ‘1968’ in a global perspective.

In a strong defence of Critical Agrarian Studies, Bettina Engels and Kristina Diez write that the approach offers analytical potential for the investigation of further dimensions of structural transformation in the countryside beyond the agrarian sector. Critical Agrarian Studies enables us to put the analysis of mining and related conflicts in a broader global historical context of commodity exploitation and frontier expansion.

One of the central concerns of our roape.net project on popular protests in Africa is to provide an appreciation of the extent to which the instances of popular protest and social movement can increase the scope for sustainable social, economic and political development, and even, on occasion to contribute to the transformation of the very conditions of continental political and economic life. In this post we republish an important article by François Houtart assessing the problems (and lessons) from South America of building a post-neoliberal alternative.

This project hopes to provide a constantly up-dated account (and archive) and analysis of instances of popular protest and examples of social movements across the African continent with a view to identifying patterns and trends.

While revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s in Europe, the United States and Latin America have been the subject of abundant literature, similar movements that emerged in Africa have received comparatively little attention. In an extract from their forthcoming book, the editors, Pascal Bianchini, Ndongo Sylla and Leo Zeilig shed new light on these political movements. They argue that Africa’s revolutionary left was extremely active in these years, and forms a vital part of global history.

ROAPE’s Peter Lawrence argues that there are strong echoes across Africa of the recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The reappearance of recession, debt and structural adjustment to the continent reminds us of the fundamental contradiction of capitalism. Based on his editorial in the forthcoming ROAPE issue 174, Lawrence concludes that there are alternatives to the continent’s enduring entrapment in a global financial system that works for the global financial corporates that dominate it.

Issue 85

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Issue 75