Free Access to ROAPE Connections Special Issue: Radical Political Economy and Industrialisation
ROAPE held the first of three workshops in Ghana, Accra on ‘Radical political economy and industrialisation in Africa’, 13–14 November 2017. Our publisher Taylor and Francis have made the special issue from the workshop accessible until the end of the year. This Debate Special Issue from Volume 46, Issue 56 discusses the initiative of holding the Africa-based ROAPE meetings, why they are important and how they relate to historic socio-economic transformations, the most significant of which remains the great Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, whose centenary month coincided with the Accra workshop.
This is the first of the workshops which ROAPE has sponsored across the continent in cooperation with local organisations. A similar version of the Accra meeting, held in Dar es Salaam in April of this year, will appear in a forthcoming issue. These workshops deliberately avoid an academic character and included a substantial proportion of activists from across the continent as well as academics and those who fit both descriptions. The feedback from participants has been very positive, as is evidenced by the response of speakers and other participants alike in respectively submitting their presentations and blogposts. The workshops have been filmed and we have made some of the footage available on roape.net (click here).
Most importantly for ROAPE these workshops reflect on the journal’s original political purpose: to provide a forum for progressive and socialist activists and academics on the African continent which provides an analysis of African realities that will assist, however modestly, progressive forces in their struggles against corporate imperialism. The workshops also reflect the other founding purpose of the journal: to find or stimulate answers to the question of what is to be done to effect radical change, a question more on the agenda today than ever before.
This Debate Special Issue features contributions from Yao Graham, Ray Bush, Leo Zeilig, Peter Lawrence, Giuliano Martiniello, Ben Fine, Max Ajl, Bettina Engels, Gordon Crawford and Gabriel Botchwey, discussing the revolution in Burkina Faso, artisanal mining in Ghana, financialisation and industrialisation across the continent and large-scale land and agricultural investments in Uganda and Tanzania.
To read the full Debate Special Issue from Accra, please click here.
