In The Rule of Law and Governance in Indigenous Yoruba Society, John Ayotunde Isola Bewaji has two main goals. The first is to provide an exploration of aspects of indigenous Yoruba philosophy of law. The second is to relate this philosophy of law to the Yoruba indigenous traditions of governance, with a view to appreciating the relevance of the Yoruba traditions of law and governance to contemporary African experiments with imported Western democracy in the 21st century. This book is devoted to what can be described as a juridical forensic investigation of Nigeria’s predicament of developmental deficit, leading to gross and unconscionable impoverishment of large segments of the population, in the midst of so much natural resources and abundant human capital, using Yoruba indigenous legal traditions as reflective template. Bewaji urges that Africa has to take seriously the necessity of obedience, observance, enforcement and operation of law as no respecter of persons, groups, affiliations and pedigrees as was in the case in the societies founded by our ancestors, rather than the present scenario whereby the highest bidder procures semblances of justice from a crooked system of common law which was never designed to be fair, equitable and just to the disadvantaged in society.

In Fragmented Identities of Nigeria: Sociopolitical and Economic Crises, edited by John Ayotunde Isola Bewaji and Rotimi Omosulu, readers are offered essays which explore the historiogenesis and ontological struggles of Nigeria as a geographical expression and a political experiment. The transdisciplinary contributions in this book analyze Nigeria as a microcosm of global African identity crises to address the deep-rooted conflicts within multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, multi-religious, and multicultural societies. By studying Nigeria as a country manufactured for the interests of colonial forces and ingrained with feudal hegemonic agendas of global powers working against the emancipation of African people, Fragmented Identities of Nigeria examines the history, evolution, and consequences of Nigeria’s sociopolitical and economic crises. The contributors make suggestions for pulling Nigeria from the brink of an identity implosion which was generated by years of misgovernance by leaders without vision or understanding of what is at stake in global black history. Throughout, the collection argues that it is time for Nigeria to reassess, renegotiate, and reimagine Nigeria’s future, whether it be through finding an amicable way the different ethnicities can continue to co-exist as federating or confederating units, or to dissolve the country which was created for economic exploitation by the United Kingdom.

Identity Re-creation in Global African Encounters explores race, racial politics, and racial transformation in the context of Africa’s encounters with non-African communities through various perspectives including oppression, racialization of ethnic difference, and identity deconstruction. While the contributors recognize that ethnicity has long been a staple analytical category of engagements between African and non-African communities, they present a holistic view of the continent and its diaspora through race outside of both colonial and neocolonial binaries, allowing for a more nuanced study of Africa and its diaspora.

Illustrating the collective power and relevance of feminist theory today, Mary Caputi and Patricia Moynagh have carefully selected a diverse international range of leading scholars and activists to critically assess key social and political challenges in the twenty-first century. This Research Handbook demonstrates a variety of feminist analyses that offer compelling insights into an array of topics, including police brutality, the carceral state, racial and sexualised violence, trans rights, climate change, and the denial of reproductive rights.

Ifeanyi Menkiti’s articulation of an African conception of personhood—especially in “Person and Community in African Traditional Thought” —has become very influential in African philosophy. Menkiti on Community and Becoming a Person contributes to the debate in African philosophy on personhood by engaging with various aspects of Menkiti’s account of person and community. The contributors examine this account in relation to themes such as individualism, communalism, rights, individual liberty, moral agency, communal ethics, education, state and nation building, elderhood and ancestorhood. Through these themes, this book, edited by Edwin Etieyibo and Polycarp Ikuenobe, shows that Menkiti’s account of personhood in the context of community is both fundamental and foundational to epistemological, metaphysical, logical, ethical, legal, social and political issues in African thought systems.

Decolonisation has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West’s direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing ‘morality’ or ‘authenticity’; it suffocates African thought and denies African agency. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò fiercely rejects the indiscriminate application of ‘decolonisation’ to everything from literature, language and philosophy to sociology, psychology and medicine. He argues that the decolonisation industry, obsessed with cataloguing wrongs, is seriously harming scholarship on and in Africa. He finds ‘decolonisation’ of culture intellectually unsound and wholly unrealistic, conflating modernity with coloniality, and groundlessly advocating an open-ended undoing of global society’s foundations. Worst of all, today’s movement attacks its own cause: ‘decolonisers’ themselves are disregarding, infantilising and imposing values on contemporary African thinkers. This powerful, much-needed intervention questions whether today’s ‘decolonisation’ truly serves African empowerment. Táíwò’s is a bold challenge to respect African intellectuals as innovative adaptors, appropriators and synthesisers of ideas they have always seen as universally relevant.

The philosophical inquiry of responsibility is a major and fast-growing field. It not only features questions around free will and moral agency but also addresses various challenges in the social, institutional, and legal contexts in which people are being held responsible. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Responsibility is an outstanding survey and exploration of these issues. Comprised of forty-one chapters by an international team of contributors, the Handbook is divided into three clear parts – on the history, the theory, and the practice of responsibility – within which the following key topics are examined: responsibility and wrongdoing responsibility and determinism the scope of responsibility the responsibility of individuals within society the concepts of responsibility the conditions and challenges of responsibility the practices of being and holding responsible the ethics and politics of responsibility responsibility in the law. Including suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Responsibility provides an extremely useful guide to the topic. It will be valuable reading for students and researchers in philosophy and applied ethics, as well as for those in related fields such as politics, law, and policymaking.