Delegation to ICs has increased rapidly since 1990, leading to a proliferation of international courts with a fundamentally different design. There are now 20 active ICs, plus eight more ICs that exist mostly on paper. "New style" international courts have compulsory jurisdiction, and often they have access for non-state actors...
This essay provides an introduction to eight papers on the theme of Islam and the Public Sphere in Africa that resulted from two conferences organized by the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA) in 2007. The author argues that these papers challenge the dichotomous thinking that...
This essay explores how the evolving relationship between religion and the state is affecting the educational system in Senegal. In 2002, the state enacted reforms that introduced the religious education into the state school system and also allowed all children enrolled in the daara (Senegalese Qur'anic schools) to be considered...
This essay examines the relationship between religion and the state as articulated in the thought of the founding father of the Republic of Senegal: Leopold Sedar Senghor (Senegal's first President) and Mamadou Dia (Senegal's first Prime Minister). Although Senghor was Catholic and Dia a Muslim, they shared a vision of...
From peacekeeping to telecommunication standards, the number, level of detail, and subject matter of international agreements have grown exponentially in recent decades. What are the consequences of the sheer complexity of international governance today? This symposium suggests a new framework to understand this proliferation of international accords: "international regime complexity."...
The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was the first step in the process of European integration. Its founders had lofty aspirations that integration in the coal and steel would spill into a larger endeavor, and early scholarly analyses suggested that coal and steel integration was spurring more fundamental political...
As the result of centuries of transregional commerce by Muslim merchants and the attendant networks developed by Muslim scholarly families, Islam was well established in the Sahel and Upper Guinea Coast by the seventeenth century. Commercial markets, Muslim states and Islamic institutions developed during a long, generally peaceful process of...
This working paper surveys Islamic organizations, movements, and ideologies in Nigeria, roughly identifying them along the lines of Islamic traditionalism, Sufi orders (turuq lit. pathways), Salafi/Wahhabi revivalism2 modernist and insurgent Islam(ism), trado-Islamic and Christo-Islamic syncretism and deviant “Islamic” cultism. Previous academic studies of Nigerian Islam were often limited to the...
The apparent interest today in Nigerian visual culture has necessitated this paper. Therefore, its
primary focus shall be on the status of visual data from the burgeoning ephemera as a source of
historical knowledge. Using selected visual illustrations in the posters, cartoons and photographs
that were at the core of...
This paper examines participation in the public economy among two groups of African women, the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria and the Baganda of central Uganda, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The analysis considers many kinds of economic activity other than growing food for one’s own family, including independent income-generating...