Samir Amin - search results

Issue 1

In an interview with Jean Copans, ROAPE's Leo Zeilig asks him about a lifetime dedicated to research, activism and writing on Africa. Determined always to carry out serious investigation in his own research, Copans explains we must ensure that our ‘radical’ understanding is not completely divorced from the real world.

In a review of Food Insecurity and Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa: Agrarian Questions in Egypt and Tunisia, by Habib Ayeb and Ray Bush, Bettina Engels argues that the authors make a major contribution to countering the widely held notion that the peasantry is politically passive. The book also considers the vital role that family farmers played in the 2010 and 2011 uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia.

In an account of his environmental activism and research in North Africa, Hamza Hamouchene insists that we cannot discuss the ecological and climate crisis without talking about social and economic justice and tackling national and popular sovereignty on natural resources.

In a celebration of Andre Gunder Frank and Walter Rodney, David Seddon looks at two men who have had a profound influence on generations of activists and researchers. Gunder Frank regarded underdevelopment in the Third World as a direct consequence of the development of Western capitalism. While Rodney followed some of the arguments of Gunder Frank and described how Africa had been exploited by European imperialism leading directly to the underdevelopment of most of the continent.

Rama Salla Dieng introduces a series of interviews with African feminists that roape.net will be posting in the coming weeks. In recent months across Africa we have witnessed women taking to the street to reclaim a fairer and more just world. In these protests and movements woman have often played a leading role. In interviews conducted by Rama, young African feminists will discuss how they are theorising their practice and philosophies.

In the second part of Matt Swagler’s blogpost on the Russian Revolution, he focuses on how Marxist ideas became central to African political organizing...

In 1981 a radical journal was launched on the side of 'struggling people' and against so-called 'African socialism'. The Journal of African Marxists published articles, reviews and briefings but also organised conferences and local committees across the continent. The journal sought to 'to stimulate the debate on the correct path appropriate to the conditions of Africa.' David Seddon celebrates the eleven issues of an unusual and important forum for African Marxists that survived briefly more than three decades ago.

Political economist Tamás Gerőcs discusses the relationship between Africa and Eastern Europe’s experience of socialist development raised at the recent ROAPE workshop in Dar es Salaam. He argues that across the world the left needs to develop a social critique of post-war developmentalism not only on a moral basis but economically and socially, to help us understand the neoliberal transformation, or counter-revolution.

In a major contribution to the on-going debate on imperialism, Patrick Bond argues that an explanation of imperialist political-economy and geopolitics must incorporate subimperialisms. John Smith’s old-fashioned binary of North/South prevents him from fully engaging with David Harvey’s overall concern about uneven geographical development.