The topic of African moral economy was first raised by Goran Hyden in 1980 as one of the main obstacles to economic transformation of the African peasantry. The suggestion caused serious academic debates between the proposer and other scholars on African societies, especially those using political economy as the framework of their analysis. But Hyden continued to defend his thesis until interest in the debate faded out. More recently Japanese scholars have taken up the topic as it appears to have new relevance in comparison with the fast transformations which have taken place in Southeast Asian rural communities. The focus of this book is to give a detailed comparison between African rural communities and those of Southeastern Asia. Attention is focused on the two main aspects of African peasantry life: the right to subsistence and the norm of reciprocity. A wide interdisciplinary approach is employed to demonstrate the dynamism displayed by these societies.

A radical new approach to understanding Africa's elections: explaining why politicians, bureaucrats and voters so frequently break electoral rules.

This book offers fresh academic insights, reflections, questions, issues, and approaches to development ethics, taking into account, African values and ethics. Development ethics is an area of applied ethics that examines the moral issues involved in global, social, and economic transformation. While it is a relatively new discipline, there have been numerous scholarly publications on it from Western perspectives. However, only a few studies that focused on development ethics from the African perspective. To address this gap, the book seeks to answer critical questions such as "What does development mean to Africans?", "How can we measure development?", "Who gets to decide?", and "What constitutes just development in Africa?" With contributions from African scholars from diverse backgrounds, the book covers various development themes such as Theories and approaches to development ethics in Africa, Environmental Ethics and African Development, Ethics, Politics and African Development, Migration and African development, Gender, Ethics and Socio-economic Development in Africa, Education, Ethics and African development. It is an essential resource for researchers, lecturers, and students interested in political philosophy and African culture studies.

The term ‘moral’ has had a chequered history in sub-Saharan Africa, mainly due to the legacy of colonialism and Apartheid (in South Africa). In contrast to moral education as a vehicle of cultural imperialism and social control, this volume shows moral education to be concerned with both private and public morality, with communal and national relationships between human beings, as well as between people and their environment. Drawing on distinctive perspectives from philosophy, economics, sociology and education, it offers the African ethic of Ubuntu/Botho as a plausible alternative to Western approaches to morality and shows how African ethics speaks to political and economic life, including ethnic conflict and HIV/AIDS, and may be an antidote to the current practice of timocracy that values money over people. The volume provides sociological tools for understanding the lived morality of those marginalised by poverty, and analyses the effects of culture, religion and modern secularisation on moral education. With contributions from fourteen African scholars, this book challenges dominant frameworks, and begins conversations for mutual benefit across the North-South divide. It has global implications, not just, but especially, where moral education is undertaken in pluralist contexts and in the presence of economic disparity. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Moral Education.

Africa is not merely an invention with a modern, imperial or colonial background. Nor is it simply a continent in need of foreign aid from the richer, more affluent societies. Africa might be economically needy, politically unstable, and, in part, socially chaotic and suffering from civil wars and social unrest. However, the continent and its peoples are certainly different from the negative image portrayed in the mass media. Africa had been the cradle of civilization in the pre-colonial era, and is today undergoing a diverse cultural, philosophical, and spiritual development with great potential, contributing to contemporary debates around the ethics of globality. The novelty of this book derives from its multidisciplinary approach. Although the authors generally come from the fields of development and economics, global studies, political science, philosophy and ethics, and sociology, they present Africa’s alternative view of human wellbeing in order to provide theories and policy recommendations which inspire the specific developmental patterns for the growth of the continent. The volume discusses the meaning of development for the continent by drawing on culture, identity, ethnicity, and philosophy of nature. The contributors examine a variety of issues and themes directly related to the opportunities provided by globality to promote the development of the continent. They also discuss solutions for underdevelopment and poverty, and how those perspectives might be effectively integrated into the global agenda for the development of Africa.

Having taught on ethics in Africa for almost a decade, James Nkansah-Obrempong presents a work that goes some way to addressing the dearth of materials on ethics that combine African social, religious, cultural and moral values with biblical and theological values. Integrating these from African, Western and biblical contexts Nkansah demonstrates how important they are for dealing with contemporary moral and social issues facing the church in Africa and African societies. The book develops a theoretical, biblical and theological foundation for Theological Ethics and uses this to address the broader issues that affect the socio-political and economic life of African people and the church.