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In an interview with Yusuf Serunkuma, ROAPE asks him about his forthcoming book on oil, capitalists, and livelihoods in western Uganda. The book is a co-edited volume with Eria Serwajja and brings together six junior Ugandan scholars and activists.  Serunkuma details the struggles of rural people to confront and harmonise interests with oil explorers, with environmental destruction and compensation that has turned lives upside down  

In memory of his father, who passed away earlier in October, Yusuf Serunkuma offers a heartfelt political reflection on his father’s unfulfilled dreams since Uganda’s independence in 1962.  Recounting the story of his father's dismissal from a textile factory in the early 1990s, he illustrates the devastating impact of the neoliberal austerity policies imposed by the World Bank and the IMF on the lives of ordinary Ugandans. These imperialist interventions dismantled the material progress and aspirations of the generation that won independence, and continue to suppress the hopes of both present and future generations.

After ten years working on the Review of African Political Economy’s website, Leo Zeilig reflects on the struggles, history and analysis that has been published on the platform. The website has proclaimed loudly for a radical agenda on the continent and has been resolute in supporting struggles of communities and working people fighting for justice and liberation.  As he steps away, Leo shares his reflections on ROAPE and the website.

After Voices for African Liberation: Conversations with the Review of African Political Economy, ROAPE is pleased to publish a new edited collection, Capitalism and Economic Crime in Africa: The Neoliberal Period. The volume brings together a collection of research articles, briefings and blog posts that were published over a period of nearly 40 years (1986–2023), in our journal and on our website. Here, the book's editor Jörg Wiegratz introduces the book, followed by Yusuf Serunkuma's foreword to the collection. Both Wiegratz and Serunkuma firmly locate economic crime in Africa within a global, neoliberal capitalist order that sustains accumulation in the global centres of power and wealth and reproduces dependency and underdevelopment on the continent.

ROAPE’s Reg Cline-Cole introduces the first issue of the journal (Vol. 51, Issue 179) in the year of our 50th anniversary, and as a fully open access publication. Though this year, Reg explains, is a new beginning, it is also a return to ROAPE’s radical origins half a century ago. The entire new issue is available for the first time fully open access, with no paywall or barriers to access anywhere in the world. Each article, briefing and review is accessible through the links below.

In January 2024, Makerere University in Kampala hosted a two-day conference to reflect on 40 years of neoliberalism in Uganda. Writing on the conference, Serunkuma reminds us that, 40 years on, Uganda remains an epicentre of neoliberalism - or what he terms the 'new colonialism' in Africa. Consequently, neoliberalism and its many ills must remain at the forefront of scholarly and activist discussion and analysis.

In this blog post, Yusuf Serunkuma draws a compelling comparison between Bobi Wine of Uganda and Fela Kuti of Nigeria, both of whom are recognized as among Africa's most creative artists and courageous political activists for their resistance against dictatorship. Serunkuma emphasises that despite the possibility that Bobi Wine's music and activism may have surpassed Fela Kuti's, he remains underappreciated by Western observers.

ROAPE contributor, Yusuf Serunkuma, reviews a new book on the loneliness of the left. Left Alone is a highly original collection of urgent stories, reflections and short essays from around the world on the lived experiences of left loneliness from a variety of genres and left political currents. Serunkuma praises a volume that capture struggles in the trenches of authoritarianism, and on the streets of the capitalist world.

Yusuf Serunkuma argues that the apparent success and smoothness of electoral ‘democracy’ in African states is a recipe for disaster—just as bad as Africa under conflict. Beneath the hype is the ruthless continuity of economic and political control by Western companies and governments. Serunkuma argues that elections across the continent are invariably a trap that disguises naked and unabashed plunder.   

Yusuf Serunkuma asks how the continued and violent colonisation of the continent has not been more systematically resisted. In a long-read, Serunkuma looks at the extraordinary control of the continent, from banking, the coffee trade, land grabs and mining. Why have Africans failed to see these forms of foreign control as ‘colonial,’ in which former colonisers have continued the pillage of the continent?