Recent weeks have seen a crackdown by Egyptian authorities against civil society organizations. ROAPE urges our readers to support the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights which faces a clampdown on its senior personnel.
ROAPE's Jörg Wiegratz explains the parameters to this project, which he sees as seeking a critical understanding of some of the key ground-level dynamics of the fight against fraud, including those that contribute to actual fraud containment and reduction.
In this introduction to a major paper on the Near East and North Africa, ROAPE's Ray Bush focuses on the struggles by small farmers across the region. He notes the spike in protests since the food price hikes of 2008 that had intensified rural malnutrition, poverty and inequality. How can the battle for livelihood and food security by the regions small and family farmers be assisted?
For roape.net Max Ajl interviews radical geographer and activist Habib Ayeb about food sovereignty, the peasantry in North Africa and film-making. Ayeb is a founder member of the Observatory of Food Sovereignty and Environment and Max Ajl is a sociologist, activist and an editor at Jadaliyya and Viewpoint. The interview was conducted on March 4, 2018, in Tunis, Tunisia.
Recent weeks have seen a crackdown by Egyptian authorities against civil society organizations. ROAPE urges our readers to support the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights which faces a clampdown on its senior personnel.
Firoze Manji writes that discontent has been growing across the continent, with spontaneous eruptions and mass uprisings that have in some cases resulted in the overthrow of regimes. In such circumstances, one would have thought that this would have been fertile grounds for the emergence of strong left working class movements across the continent. But why has this not happened?
Koert Lindijer writes how the gap between rich and poor is enormous in Kenya. From the perspective of poor inhabitants - the majority - Kenya’s elite is rich thanks to massive corruption. Lindijer writes about the depth and extent of this corruption and the valiant efforts to bring the elite to justice.
Writer and activist Khadija Sharife describes the devastating practice of platinum price fixing. She sees how the role of the market in Africa as ‘sole regulator’ of value is kept in place for its fictive neutrality, its political-economic usefulness in not ‘seeing’ and therefore disguising socio-economic conflicts and injustices.
Carin Runciman reports on a recent workshop that focused on protests in South Africa. Based on research conducted by the Research Chair in Social Change she shows that these protests are not just about service delivery, but amount to a rebellion of the poor. However, to what extent can these protests break from the politics of the ANC and form a progressive movement for social change?
Ghana’s main opposition party, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) led by Nana Akuffo Addo, secured a resounding victory in the election on 7 December. For roape.net Nelson Oppong examines the political background to the victory.
Ndongo Samba Sylla argues that the CFA franc - officially created on 26 December 1945 by a decree of General de Gaulle - used across much of Africa today is a colonial relics. For those hoping to export competitive products, obtain affordable credit, work for the integration of continental trade, or fight for an Africa free from imperialist control, the CFA franc is an anachronism demanding orderly and methodical elimination.
ROAPE has long published the latest and most damning scholarship concerning Rwanda and the crimes of President Paul Kagame and the RPF. In this blogpost, Sam Broadway follows on from the work of Reydams, Reyntjens and others previously published by ROAPE, taking issue with the work of mainstream journalism in establishing and reinforcing the historical record.
