Africa is huge, internationally vital, potentially rich and powerful yet mired in failure - political, economic, social and even cultural. Yet the story of contemporary Africa is not just one of global tragedy but also of enormous hope for the future. This stimulating and unconventional book on Africa today and its relationship with the West explores the many complex reasons behind Africa's failure to fulfil its potential - it is a continent blighted by colonialism, exploitation and the interference of great powers in the international relations of the region - and offers some genuinely original and well-argued suggestions for ways forward. Critical and objective yet involved and sympathetic, "Grasping Africa" demonstrates Stephen Chan's deep understanding of the history and politics of Africa based on his long experience of the continent in often dangerous circumstances.

Africa is huge, internationally vital, potentially rich and powerful yet mired in failure - political, economic, social and even cultural. Yet the story of contemporary Africa is not just one of global tragedy but also of enormous hope for the future. This stimulating and unconventional book on Africa today and its relationship with the West explores the many complex reasons behind Africa's failure to fulfil its potential - it is a continent blighted by colonialism, exploitation and the interference of great powers in the international relations of the region - and offers some genuinely original and well-argued suggestions for ways forward. Critical and objective yet involved and sympathetic, "Grasping Africa" demonstrates Stephen Chan's deep understanding of the history and politics of Africa based on his long experience of the continent in often dangerous circumstances.

This volume utilizes the work initiated and executed under a recent major public health initiative, the African Tobacco Situational Analyses (ATSA), which was sponsored by the Canadian government's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) with funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The program was conceived to illuminate the factors that will facilitate the reform of major public health policies, particularly, but not limited to, tobacco. The results, presented in this volume, are an important contribution to the literature on global public health and international development, and comprise the most comprehensive evidence-based analysis of tobacco policy in the African region.

“A page-turner. The portrait of Africa that emerges is disturbing, tender, and harsh. . . . A tremendous read. I couldn’t put it down.” —Abraham Verghese, New York Times–bestselling author of The Covenant of Water A seasoned war correspondent, Jeffrey Gettleman has covered every major conflict over the past twenty years, from Afghanistan to Iraq to the Congo. For the past decade, he has served as the East Africa bureau chief for the New York Times, fulfilling a teenage dream. At nineteen, Gettleman fell in love, twice. On a do-it-yourself community service trip in college, he went to East Africa—a terrifying, exciting, dreamlike part of the world in the throes of change that imprinted itself on his imagination and on his heart. But around that same time he also fell in love with a fellow Cornell student—the brightest, classiest, most principled woman he’d ever met. To say they were opposites was an understatement. She became a criminal lawyer in America; he hungered to return to Africa. For the next decade he would be torn between these two abiding passions. A sensually rendered coming-of-age story, Love, Africa is a tale of passion, violence, far-flung adventure, tortuous long-distance relationships, screwing up, forgiveness, parenthood, and happiness that explores the power of finding yourself in the most unexpected of places. “Aptly displays why [Gettleman's] a Pulitzer Prize winner and a New York Times bureau chief . . . there's a thrilling immediacy and attention to detail in Gettleman's writing that puts the reader right beside him. . . . An absolute must-read.” —Booklist, starred review “Love, Africa offers a key to understanding humankind’s past and future and a key to understanding our hearts.” —Sheryl Sandberg

Regimes of Responsibility in Africa analyses the transformations that discourses and practices of responsibility have undergone in Africa. By doing so, this collection develops a stronger grasp of the specific political, economic and social transformations taking place today in Africa. At the same time, while focusing on case studies from the African continent, the work enters into a dialogue with the emerging corpus of studies in the field of ethics, adding to it a set of analytical perspectives that can help further enlarge its theoretical and geographical scope.

This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the history of democracy in Africa and explains why the continent's democratic experiments have so often failed, as well as how they could succeed. Nic Cheeseman grapples with some of the most important questions facing Africa and democracy today, including whether international actors should try and promote democracy abroad, how to design political systems that manage ethnic diversity, and why democratic governments often make bad policy decisions. Beginning in the colonial period with the introduction of multi-party elections and ending in 2013 with the collapse of democracy in Mali and South Sudan, the book describes the rise of authoritarian states in the 1970s; the attempts of trade unions and some religious groups to check the abuse of power in the 1980s; the remarkable return of multiparty politics in the 1990s; and finally, the tragic tendency for elections to exacerbate corruption and violence.

From Egypt to South Africa, Nigeria to Ethiopia, a new force for political change is emerging across Africa: popular protest. Widespread urban uprisings by youth, the unemployed, trade unions, activists, writers, artists, and religious groups are challenging injustice and inequality. What is driving this new wave of protest? Is it the key to substantive political change? Drawing on interviews and in-depth analysis, Adam Branch and Zachariah Mampilly offer a penetrating assessment of contemporary African protests, situating the current popular activism within its historical and regional contexts.