Looks at the political and social history of the Gold Coast in West Africa from the early 16th century to the second half of the 18th. The book examines how political entities in Nzema were structured territorially, as well as the formation of ruling groups and aspects of their political, economic, and military actions.

From Kurdistan to Somaliland, Xinjiang to South Yemen, all secessionist movements hope to secure newly independent states of their own. Most will not prevail. The existing scholarly wisdom provides one explanation for success, based on authority and control within the nascent states. With the aid of an expansive new dataset and detailed case studies, this book provides an alternative account. It argues that the strongest members of the international community have a decisive influence over whether today's secessionists become countries tomorrow and that, most often, their support is conditioned on parochial political considerations.

The challenge of state formation and national integration is evident, and the need for a solution is even more demanding in places like Africa where nation states were formed under very special historical circumstances. In Perspectives on Nation-State Formation in Contemporary Africa, author Godknows Boladei Igali presents a digest that examines the challenges of state formation and national integration in Africa and offers preferred solutions within the context of the symbolic diversities. In this study, Igali outlines the immediate context and challenges of national integration in Africa in its human dimension. He reviews the political formations of ancient Africawhich varied in size, philosophical premise, and organisational structuresand discusses partition, military invasions, conquest, and colonisation. He then addresses colonial rule or administration, African nationalism, and decolonisation and analyses the process of nation-state formation in post-independent Africa from the perspective of the political systems and ideologies Reviewing a wide range of time from ancient times through the colonial period and since independence, this survey discusses the processes of national integration and nation-state formation in Africa, providing perspectives that deepen the understanding of these nation-building processes.

This book introduces readers to the rich and fascinating history of West Africa, stretching all the way back to the stone age, and right up to the modern day. Over the course of twenty seven short and engaging chapters, the book delves into the social, cultural, economic and political history of West Africa, through prehistory, revolutions, ancient empires, thriving trade networks, religious traditions, and then the devastating impact of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and subsequent colonial rule. The book reflects on the struggle for independence and investigates how politics and economics developed in the post-colonial period. By the end of the book, readers will have a detailed understanding of the fascinating and diverse range of cultures to be found in West Africa, and of how the region relates to the rest of the world. Drawing on decades of teaching and research experience, this book will serve as an excellent textbook for entry-level History and African Studies courses, as well as providing a perfect general introduction to anyone interested in finding out about West Africa.

This book straddles the disciplines of archaeology and social anthropology. Its 25 contributions (divided into 6 sections with separate introductions) successively scrutinise the concept of war in philosophy, social theory and the history of anthropological and archaeological research; discuss warfare in pre-state and state societies; and assess its relationship to rituals, social identification and material culture.

Nach dem langen Bürgerkrieg der 1990er Jahre galt Liberia unter der Präsidentschaft des Warlords Charles Taylor vielen Beobachtern als gescheiterter Staat. Seit der Machtübernahme durch Ellen Johnson Sirleaf im Jahr 2006 wird die Landesentwicklung weithin als Erfolgsgeschichte bewertet. Felix Gerdes zeigt, welche strukturellen Änderungen zu diesem Wandel und damit zur relativen Stabilisierung führten. Seine Analysen machen deutlich, dass die liberianischen Kriege gerade nicht die Zerstörung des Staates bedeuteten, sondern als Teil des Prozesses der Staatsbildung zu verstehen sind. Die Betrachtungen der Kontinuitäten und Brüche der politischen Verfasstheit Liberias ermöglichen eine fundierte Bewertung der anhaltenden strukturellen Probleme der Nachkriegsordnung.

This volume re-publishes classical studies by Hans Daalder on three major themes: the different paths towards state formation in Europe; their effect on parties and party systems and their alleged crises; and the rise and merits of the consociational democracy model. The book throws a unique light on the development of comparative studies after World War II as seen through the eyes of an active participant. In a fascinating preface Peter Mair contrasts two scholarly generations in the field of comparative and cross-national studies.

This book examines the ways in which long-term processes of state-formation limit the possibilities for short-term political projects of statebuilding. Using process-oriented approaches, the contributing authors explore what happens when conscious efforts at statebuilding ‘meet’ social contexts, and are transformed into daily routines. In order to explain their findings, they also analyse the temporally and spatially broader structures of world society which shape the possibilities of statebuilding. Statebuilding and State-Formation includes a variety of case studies from post-conflict societies in Africa, Asia and Europe, as well as the headquarters and branch offices of international agencies. Drawing on various theoretical approaches from sociology and anthropology, the contributors discuss external interventions as well as self-led statebuilding projects. This edited volume is divided into three parts: Part I: State-Formation, Violence and Political Economy Part II: Governance, Legitimacy and Practice in Statebuilding and State-Formation Part III: The International Self – Statebuilders’ Institutional Logics, Social Backgrounds and Subjectivities The book will be of great interest to students of statebuilding and intervention, war and conflict studies, international security and IR.

A Tributary Model of State Formation: Ethiopia, 1600-2015 addresses the perplexing question of why a pedigreed Ethiopian state failed to transform itself into a nation-state. Using a comparative-institutionalist framework, this book explores why Ethiopia, an Afroasian civilizational state, has yet to build a modern political order comprising a sturdy state, the rule of law, and accountability to the ruled. The book provides a theoretical framework that contrasts the European and the Afroasian modes of state formation and explores the three major variants of the Ethiopian state since 1600 (Gondar, Shewa, and Revolutionary). It does this by employing the conceptual entry point of tributarism and teases out the implications of this perspective for refashioning the embattled postcolonial African political institutions. The primary contribution of the book is the novel framing of state formation through the lens of a landed Afroasiatic peasantry in giving rise to a fragile state whose redistributive preoccupation preempted the emergence of a productive economy to serve as a buoyant revenue base. Unlike feudal Europe, the dependence of the Afroasian state on arm’s-length overlordship rather than on tightly-managed landlordship incentivized endemic extractive contests among elites with the capacity for violence for the non-fixed tribute from independent wealth producers. Tributarism, I argue here, stymied the transition from a resilient statehood to a robust nation-statehood that befits an open-order society. This book will be of interest to scholars in economics, political science, political economics, and African Studies. Berhanu Abegaz is Professor of Economics, College of William & Mary (USA).

This Handbook provides a comprehensive synthesis of African archaeology, covering the entirety of the continent's past from the beginnings of human evolution to the archaeological legacy of European colonialism. It includes a mixture of key methodological and theoretical issues and debates and situates the subject's contemporary practice.