The proponants of international courts (ICs) expect that creating formal legal institutions will help to increase respect for international law. International relations scholars question such claims, since ICs have no tools to compel state compliance. Such views are premised on the notion that states have unique preferences that ICs must...
President Barack Obama is escalating an ambitious, U.S.-directed covert war, relying on Special Forces and high-tech strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other countries to track down and eliminate Al Qaeda leaders and militants around the world. Meanwhile, administration officials in Washington are attempting to create a legal framework for...
This paper examines secularism in Senegal from a legal viewpoint and traces the history of the deliberate manner in which the Senegalese constitution was constructed to ensure the secular orientation of the state. The author emphasizes that Senegalese secularism is not anti-religious, but rather emphasizes mutual tolerance among diverse religious...
This paper discusses the recent (2007) declaration of the Caucasus Emirate by Islamist guerilla fighters waging jihad against Russia in several republics of the Northern Caucasus (Russian Federation). It analyzes the practical reasons and ideological agendas behind the creation of this new polity that remains largely virtual with the website...
This essay asks whether the existence of a viable public sphere hinges upon the banishment of religion to the private realm. While some scholars have suggested that the encounter between "public" Islam and the democratization inevitably produces political collapse (as in the case of Algeria), the author contends that the...
Among the linkages identified between human rights law and environmental protection, the problem of anthropogenic climate change has emerged as a central concern. Some of the early focus on climate change as itself a human rights violation has given way to a more complete and forward-looking approach that considers how...
The growing religious identity throughout the world is challenging conventional social science wisdom, according to which modernization leads to the marginalization of religion in the public sphere. This discussion suggests different and alternative models for being both Muslim and modern. The focus is the family law reform within the context...
This essay discusses the role of the ulama (Islamic scholars) in the 2007 Nigerian elections. Based on interviews and the political activities and statements of the twelve members of the ulama, most of whom are from Kano, the author observes four areas of consensus among these scholars: 1) The compatiblity...
This essay analyzes the historical struggle of the Muslim community to have a voice in Kenyan politics and the Islamic topics that have surfaced during electoral periods. A minority group in Kenya, Muslims have faced political marginalization more on the basis of race and ethnicity than religion. The pre-independence period...
This essay explores Nigerian women's negotiation of public and private spheres through the meanings of hibjab (Islamic head covering for women) has taken in different contexts, both liberating and limiting women. In the 1970s with the new oil economy, increasing migration to cities and the expansion of education for women,...
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...
The object of this working paper is to present a new explanation for the behavior of rebel groups in relation to host communities. This study, which represents the main argument and ideas of my forthcoming dissertation, accounts for the change in rebel group behavior, from coercive to contractarian and vice...
Most scholars think of courts as a single category of adjudicative bodies or triadic dispute adjudication. But courts play a variety of roles in the domestic political system. Increasingly, the roles and tasks delegated to International Courts (ICs) mimic in form and content the roles and tasks delegated to courts...
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...
In this essay, I will focus on the fifth theme of the Collaborative Learning Initiative: Reclaiming Security. Attempts to reclaim security in many African countries, tragically, often lead to greater insecurity as rulers respond by heightening repression. Some even close down access to social media and global communications thereby harming...
Patrick F. Quinn states that Edgar Allan Poe wrote poems at an age “too young to have any knowledge of the world but from his own breast,” and attributes Poe’s decision to leave flaws in his “smaller pieces” intact to “[fondness fostered by] his old age” (Quinn 9). While readers...
In May 1991 the allied armies of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) and the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) overthrew the 27-year military regime (Dergue) in Ethiopia. During the succeeding 27 years, the EPRDF-dominated government attracted one of the highest per capita levels of external aid in 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...
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...
How could so many students of one scholar, one who is not immediately
remembered for his work on the arts, have produced so much major research on African
and African-American arts and artists in virtually all media? This question became the
genesis of this panel; but before turning to our...
Contemporary pattern of relationship between European Union and Africa-Caribbean and
Pacific countries reflects more than two centuries of unequal exchange. Unequal exchange
between the North and the South denotes the falling terms of trade for underdeveloped countries,
while correspondingly increasing the terms of trade for the developed countries. It has...
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...
Within Kenya’s political scene, racial and ethnic identities play a crucial role in creating division
in Muslims’ political engagement. Since independence, the racial and ethnic antagonism among
them has weakened a united Muslim’ voice whenever political issues concerning the community
arose. As Kenya was preparing for independence, a section of...
Writing this keynote address has been a fraught and sobering experience, heightened by
an acute feeling of stepping outside my scholarly comfort zone in east and central African
history before the 19th century CE. The discomfort encouraged me to shift positions, in this case
from that of a scholar writing...
As a world power after World War II, some U.S. government officials and private
foundations realized how little we knew of Africa, though allied troops had been engaged
in North Africa and transported through West Africa. And the Cold War was leading to
growing USSR influence in Africa. “It...
On 6 February 2007, President Bush announced that the United States would
create a new military command for Africa, to be known as Africa Command or Africom.
Throughout the Cold War and for more than a decade afterwards, the U.S. did not have a
military command for Africa; instead, U.S....
This collection of papers contains most of the papers that were delivered at the workshop on
“Normality in Health and the Reproductive Body” at Northwestern in March 2001. The seminar
was used to discuss individual research projects around convergences of thought on the theme at
hand. In their present state,...
The completion of this study could not have been possible without the invaluable support
of several individuals. This work is a revised version of my first year research paper, and as such,
I would first like to thank Timothy Breen and my colleagues in the E-70 seminar for their
thoughtful...
The primer addresses interdisciplinary work on two levels. It outlines and exemplifies
anthropological modes of thinking, and how those can be applied to numbers through the capacities of the
Epi Info program. At a more practical level it uses particular material to guide the reader through setup
and analysis.
Section...
This paper explores the relationship between the French state and francophone Africa since
decolonization, rather than narrating the history of French-African policies (Domergue-Cloarec 1994;
Wauthier 1995) or providing an introduction to the full range of cultural, social, and political relations
8
(Manning 1988; Chipman 1989; Andereggen 1994). The focus is...
This paper was commissioned by the Program of African Studies (PAS) as a complement
to the new edition of Dahomean Narrative that was published by Northwestern University Press
as part of the celebration of the PAS’s fiftieth anniversary. The new forward to the volume
places Dahomean Narrative within the history...
Though brief, this study has benefited from the intellectual and moral support of many individuals. I
owe an enormous debt of gratitude to colleagues who have provided me with both their time and
criticism in the preparation of this paper. I am particularly grateful to those who have been most...
The following bibliography developed in conjunction with the research project AMoney Morals:
The Decline of the Naira in the Social Life and Popular Culture of Nigeria, 1985B1995,@
undertaken by Jane Guyer and LaRay Denzer.
To prepare this bibliography, Northwestern University=s Online Catalog (NUcat) and
Northwestern=s online catalog of papers presented...
The manuscripts known as the "cahiers Ponty", written by students at the famous Ecole William Ponty near Dakar, were created under a policy that favored ethnography as a tool as well as a discipline. Several extracts of these student notebooks are discussed here, as a sampling in order to illustrate... and Les manuscrits connus comme les « cahiers Ponty », écrits par les étudiants du célèbre Ecole William Ponty près de Dakar, ont été créés sous une politique qui a favorisé l’ethnographie comme outil aussi bien que discipline. Quelques extraits de ces cahiers sont discutés ici, comme un échantillonage pour illustrer...
There are few concerns greater than those of a parent with an adult with an intellectual or developmental disability (I/DD). How is she or he going to be taken care of as she or he ages? The government provides services and support in the pursuit of care and services, but...
It has been hypothesized that mindfulness-based programs with a primary focus on teaching self-compassion or empathy will have greater effects on self-compassion and empathy than will mindfulness-based exposure programs, which focus primarily on enhancing present moment awareness and reducing distress. However, because research on mindfulness-based exposure programs has centered on...
Over the last decades, there have been many changes in the business world that are associated with 52 percent of Fortune 500 companies either going bankrupt, being acquired by other companies, or ceasing to exist. One critical change is the transformation of the economy into a knowledge-based economy, where information...
The goal of this research paper is to analyze concepts of armed conflict and peacebuilding from a gender perspective using a feminist epistemology approach.
I examine the impact of armed conflict on women, and the implications of women’s roles in armed conflict and in peacebuilding processes post-conflict. In doing so,...