Peter Lawrence - search results

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Panthers told their members and supporters that to be a good revolutionary you must make time to read for at least two hours a day. We realise with the almighty, soul-destroying pressures of work and neoliberalism, this will seem like an impossible luxury to many of our readers and supporters; but it’s a good objective for 2023, and the political and personal challenges to recalibrate the world, and our lives, for a just and socialist alternative. It’s in this spirit that we – members of ROAPE’s Editorial Group – offer the following list of our favourite radical reads over the last 12 months.

In a far-reaching long-read for ROAPE, writer and commentator Yusuf Serunkuma argues that ‘democracy’ in Africa is not just a language of (colonial) exploitation, it is the practice of exploitation itself. Our challenge today, is to understand the colonial nature of this democracy - divide and rule, shameless free markets, foreign aid, and loans & media bombardment - and the myriad, so-called good-intentioned crusaders who promote it.

ROAPE's Peter Dwyer interviews the scholar-activist Tunde Zack-Williams. In 2020, Zack-Williams became the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom’s Distinguished Africanist. For decades, his research and writing on economic and political reform across Africa has focused on alternatives to western prescriptions, which has influenced his work as an editor of ROAPE.

From the editorial of the latest issue of ROAPE, Elisa Greco provides an excoriating denunciation of Africa’s underdevelopment in the context of the pandemic. Unpicking the political strategy of neo-extractivism, she argues that every global recession, or primary commodity prices downturn, African economies which bought into this model succumb to crisis and recession.

John Loxley was a radical economist and a political activist. In a series of short eulogies by Issa Shivji, John Saul and Peter Lawrence, John is remembered as an extremely skilled and articulate radical economist and as an equally articulate and committed radical activist.

Issue 96

Issue 66

Issue 43

Issue 42

Issue 32