The theme for this edition of the CODESRIA Bulletin is curled from the thematic priorities of the 2017-2021 Strategic Plan. These are: ‘Democratic processes, governance, citizenship and security in Africa’ and ‘Ecologies, Economies and Societies in Africa.’ The Bulletin addresses two important sets of questions. The first focuses on how Africa, along with all the changes and transformations that define it today, is and should be governed. That includes issues of statehood, democratization, the rule of law and human rights, security and violence, transitional justice, and other attendant governance processes and mechanisms at local, national, regional and international levels. These continue to constitute some of the most important issues of concern in many African countries that, naturally, also orient the work of the Council. The second explores aspects of the Anthropocene in Africa, the forms it takes, its histories and trajectories and impact on a broad set of sectors including the continent’s burgeoning economies. This theme provokes important questions related to land, food security and poverty that persistently dominate public debate and remain of global concern. Africa continues to be challenged by the contradictions and complexities of ‘development’, climate change and population growth, especially in cities. The evolving nature of rural and urban centres, particularly propelled by the growing purchasing power of new elites, coupled with the expanding wealth gap are redefining and creating new dynamics for cohabitation. Insecurity, uncertainty and undignified living constitute key challenges for a continent that continues to struggle with the global capitalist system. Read the Full Editorial

Published: January 15, 2019

This issue of the CODESRIA Bulletin is produced at the end of the 2013–2016 programme cycle, and therefore at the beginning of a new programatic cycle and strategic plan. The 2017–2021 programme cycle has been entrusted with: “Reaching New Frontiers in Social Science Research and Knowledge Production for African Transformation and Development.” The new strategic plan builds on the recommendations of major comprehensive internal reviews aimed at sharpening the council’s mandate to develop the social sciences and humanities in Africa for better transformation and development within the context of continual global changes. These include: review of the intellectual agenda, membership, governance and management. The new strategic plan builds on the achievements of the past strategic cycle, ensuring consolidation and renewal, and ushering innovations in programme delivery and management; deeply emphasising the importance of basic research, and its relevance for policy, as well as community and civil society engagements. The new strategic plan prioritises three key thematic areas: democratic processes, governance, citizenship and security; ecologies, economies and societies; and higher education dynamics in a changing Africa. In addition to these three thematic priorities, a set of six crosscutting themes meant to suffuse all CODESRIA research; training and publications have been set. These include: gender; generations; alternatives and futures; inequality, rurality and urbanity; and memory and history. Most notable is a re-imagination and narrowing of research vehicles such as the traditional National Working Groups, Comparative Research Networks, and Multinational Working Groups which have now been collapsed under one vehicle – the Meaning-Making Research Initiative (MRI) to offer researchers the space to carryout and produce deeper empirical but also much more theoretically grounded and policy relevant basic research. Read the Full Editorial

Published: June 22, 2018

Ours is the era of the anthropocene; the age in which the human factor is, it is agreed, probably more determining in almost everything than it has ever been. The very first question that this raises is how to understand this era, and finding answers to that question requires the full mobilization of the humanities and social sciences. It also calls for a repositioning of the disciplines in order to make them speak to each other in ways that could make multidisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity truly meaningful. Another question that arises is that of how to build a new ‘civilization’, which, after all, is what ‘development’ according to one of the founders of CODESRIA, Professor Samir Amin, should be about. The new civilization will be ecological and characterized by all the good things that make our societies, economies and governance systems, and our world more inclusive, just, and accommodating; in short: democratic and ‘developing’. It would certainly not be ‘dreamland’ or nirvana, but one where the ‘good life’ for the individual and collective would not seem totally unrealizable. Read the Full Editorial

Published: December 21, 2016

The state of intellectual freedom is, in many ways, both a Treflection of the degree of openness and inclusiveness of our societies and of the state of democracy. Academic freedom, in the words of Thandika Mkandawire, is, in truth, about the building of a new civilization. It is a site of struggle for democracy, and one could argue that where intellectual freedom really exists, authoritarianism and fundamentalism will find it more difficult to go unchecked. Read the Full Editorial

Published: May 27, 2016

Published: January 18, 2015

Published: June 16, 2015

Published: January 15, 2015

Published: June 17, 2014

Published: December 17, 2013

Published: June 4, 2013