Tag Archives: Africa

Blog

Markus Virgil Hoehne: Perpetuating conflict through democratization: Presidential elections in Somalia

Presidential elections will happen in Somalia on Sunday, 15 May 2022. This will most likely not bring peace and stability to the war-torn Somali society. To the contrary, the elections and their aftermath will, in all probability, perpetuate and even worsen to political crisis in the country. On the one hand, the electoral process has already dragged on for almost two years, producing violent clashes between government and opposition forces and instigating vote buying and other forms of political corruption (Gaas and Hansen 2022).  On the other hand, and this might even be worse, the country’s “democratization process” is out of tune with important political realities in Somalia, namely with the fact that the government only holds nominal power in parts of Somalia.

Militant Islamists control much of southern Somalia; the northwest of the country has declared its independence 30 years ago and exists since as the secessionist Republic of Somaliland. Other areas in central and northeastern Somalia are to some degree autonomous, partly controlled by clan militias. This means that the government controls only around 20 percent of Somalia’s territory. Foreign troops have to assist the government to hold its areas. Southern Somalia, where most of the resources and the economy of Somalia are concentrated, is still in a phase of active war (EASO 2021).

It can be assumed that the government in Mogadishu would, without external support, collapse even quicker than the Afghan government did in the wake of the US-withdrawal in mid-2021. Moreover, in the areas controlled by the government and its external allies, hardly any services are delivered to the ordinary population. The hallmark of the nominal Somali governments since many years is internal wrangling and massive embezzlement of the state’s budget including the income from foreign aid. The question is: what does the presidential election bring at all? My answer is: it helps to keep up a façade, which serves external actors, including the USA, Ethiopia, the EU and many INGOs and UN organizations, in that it allows the conduct of “business” (development business, counter-terrorism business, political stabilization business, humanitarian business) which enriches a few international and local elites, while it keeps the bulk of Somalis in extreme poverty and caught up in protracted conflict.

A story of many missed deadlines

Somalia should have had a new parliament and a new president long ago. The term of office of the current president Mohamed Ali Farmajo ended in February 2021. The UN and western donors including the USA and the EU have been pushing for free elections already for years (since around 2018). At the same time, the “one person one vote” formula introduced into Somalia’s politics was and remains unrealistic. While external actors, mainly UN officials, tried to push this voting-scheme through, President Farmajo actively undermined it by not taking any steps to prepare elections. This led to conflicts between the president and the prime minister, with the latter trying to steer the preparations of the elections. Eventually, as ACLED (2021) outlined, also in the face of ongoing war in southern Somalia, the major political actors agreed in mid-2020 to holding indirect elections in Somalia – in a similar way as the last elections in 2017.

This indirect election process is complicated: At the local level, family elders nominate a total of almost 30,000 electoral women and men. These then determine the 275 members of the lower house of parliament, the seats of which are not distributed according to party-membership, but according to belonging to patrilineal descent groups (and according to personal networks and who can pay which bribes). The 54 members of the upper house are nominated by electoral committees of the Somali federal member states. Together, the two houses then elect the president (Elmi 2021). President Mohamed A. Farmajo prefers indirect elections because they are strongly controlled by the presidents of the federal member states, some of whom are his supporters. Yet, he even did not push very energetically for the completion of this process. When his term ended on 8th February 2021, no members of parliament had been elected so that Farmajo was able to extend his mandate by decree for two years. This was, I would argue, the easiest way for him to stay in power.

However, it led to violent reactions. Temporarily, armed opposition supporters occupied parts of Mogadishu. The crisis finally calmed down in mid-2021 when Somali elites and external supporters agreed on indirect elections to be concluded by the end of February 2022. Although this deadline was missed, by the end of April 2022 all members of both houses had finally been elected and nominated. During the indirect election process, massive influence (buying of votes and exercising political pressure, even intimidating members of the electoral committees, elders or candidates) was exercised. The complete parliament can now vote for one of the more than thirty nominated presidential candidates. Again, much money is clandestinely changing hands these days in Mogadishu; and gun-prices are going up on the capital’s markets, according to The New Humanitarian.

Elections in a long-term battlefield

Violence in Somalia escalated from the end of the 1970s. In the context of the Cold War, first the Soviet Union and then the US and their respective allies (such as German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany) supplied arms to the dictatorship under Siyad Barre (1969-91) – even when it was evident that human rights violations would be committed with them. In 1991, rebels overthrew the dictatorial regime, but they were unable to agree on a new government. The state arsenals were broken open, and the population armed itself. Chaos and violence led to a famine that claimed hundreds of thousands of victims by the end of 1992. As a result, the USA and the UN intervened with up to 30,000 blue helmets to guarantee the supply of the civilian population with humanitarian aid and to restore political order. It was the first time in the history of the UN that blue helmets were deployed in a country without the government’s consent. The operation failed: the famine was alleviated admittedly, but the armed intervention intensified the fighting. The USA and the UN cooperated with some warlords and attempted to capture others, such as Mohamed Farah Aideed.
This led to the solidarity of many Somalis with Aideed, who, as a former army officer, was involved in the overthrow of dictator Barre. When American special forces tried to seize him in October 1993, fighting broke out in Mogadishu. Hundreds Somalis and 18 American soldiers were killed in the house-to-house fighting (depicted, albeit with an extreme US-centric [and racist] bias, in Ridley Scott’s movie Black Hawk Down). Subsequently, all intervention troops withdrew from Somalia by May 1995. The weapons and the warlords remained. The latter made “dirty” deals with foreign companies, for instance for dumping toxic waste off the Somali coast (VOA 2009).

Only after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Muslim nation of Somalia returned to the attention of Western governments. The USA and its allies – in the Horn of Africa especially Ethiopia – cooperated with several warlords to capture and eliminate Islamist terrorist suspects in southern Somalia. At the same time, the international community initiated a peace conference for Somalia in Kenya, at which, in mid-2004, former militia leader Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed was elected president by a Somali interim parliament. However, he and his government could not enter the capital because the local population rejected him. Most Somalis were now aligned with the lslamic Courts, which promised an alternative political and economic order for Somalia, based on Sharia law. These lslamists were the only ones to ensure peace in the urban neighborhoods under their control and offered effective jurisdiction (Ibrahim 2018).

Image 1: Elections in Somalia through the lens of the United Nations (their caption: “Members of the Somali Federal parliament queue to cast their ballots for round two during the presidential election held at the Mogadishu Airport hangar on February 8, 2017. UN Photo/ Ilyas Ahmed”)


From early 2006, tensions erupted into fighting between the Islamists on one side and the government and allied warlords on the other. The militias that fought for the Islamic Courts finally gained the upper hand. They soon controlled large parts of southern Somalia. The Ethiopian army intervened in December and dispersed all but a small core of Islamist forces. This was the nucleus from which Al-Shabaab (The Youth) emerged in 2007. In the following years, Al-Shabaab evolved into the strongest Somali force, which temporarily (between 2009 and 2011) ruled southern Somalia including Mogadishu and other urban centers and was then from 2011 driven out by a massive campaign of more than 10,000 African Union-troops deployed to Somalia. As of 2022, some 22,000 AU forces are stationed in southern Somalia. Together with around 10,000 Somali National Army soldiers and a smaller number of USA special forces (waging drone war) they have not managed to defeat Al Shabaab, which not only fights a guerilla war against the Somali government and its allies but actually also governs substantial rural areas, delivering justice and security at the local level and building-up some basic legitimacy in this way, despite the fact that the violence of the extremists, exercised through harsh punishments of (alleged) criminals or enemies and through regular terror attacks with many civilian casualties mainly in Mogadishu appalls many Somalis (Hoehne and Gaas 2022; Bakonyi 2022).

No one is legitimate

While a new war – one characterized as “counter-terrorism war” – escalated in Somalia and has cost tens of thousands of lives between 2007 and today, international actors have been trying to establish a government in Mogadishu, based on a new federal constitution (which was partly drafted by German legal specialists working for the Max Planck Foundation, which contrary to the name is not a basic research institute but a consultancy firm). Based on that constitution, indirect elections were held for the first time in 2012, and Hassan Sheikh Mahamoud became president. He sought to implement the federal constitution and establish federal states. The idea was to achieve some division of power in the state and between (patrilinear descent) groups through federalization. Traditionally, in Somali society, affiliation is regulated less by territory than by descent in the paternal line. Mahamoud’s government succeeded in establishing some federal states, at least nominally. Nonetheless, Al-Shabaab still controlled the hinterland of southern Somalia.

Also Mahamoud’s government was extremely corrupt. Approximately 70 percent of the funds given from outside disappeared into the private pockets of government actors, as documented by the World Bank, among other sources. The term of office of the following president, Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo, was accompanied by massive accusations of corruption as well. Farmajo negated the federal model of government and worked toward the centralization of power.

Given the limited function and low legitimacy of Farmajo’s government and the state in Somalia as a whole, the question arises why elections are nevertheless organized at great expense. It is common knowledge how corrupt the political actors are and that they have little support among the population. A leading UN representative said in a briefing end of 2021, at which the author participated, that “no matter how the election process turns out, it will not contribute to any improvement”. A German NGO worker told an expert panel in January 2022 (again, the author was present at this meeting) that his biggest concern was how the losing side would react after the corrupt election. Some fear a new escalation of violence.

One explanation is that Somali elites and external aid workers benefit from elections. Somali elites make sure that they get well paid for their participation in the farce that the elections are. In order to continue to carry out projects in the crisis-ridden country, Western aid organizations need administrative partners to sign off on projects – which is obviously an end in itself, because the aid often does not benefit the ordinary population, but the external actors and their Somali elite partners. Moreover, the elections formally support the narrative of Western governments that things are “getting better” in Somalia. In the end, even Al-Shabaab benefits from the election disaster. Although the militant extremists do not have a broad basis of legitimacy either, they only need to do things a little better than the government, and they can gain some support from the conflict-weary population.

Instead of holding elections, Somali political actors should seek reconciliation and strive for political dialogue with all relevant powers in Somalia, including Al Shabaab. Yet, in Somalia, this seems to be made impossible by an (informal) doctrine of military counter-terrorism mixed with a focus on formal democratization and institution building, no matter how hollow the construct of the thus erected “government” is.  

Markus Virgil Hoehne is a social anthropologist at the University of Leipzig researching on conflict, identity, state-building, and dealing with the violent past in Somalia and Peru. He has been working on Somali issues since 2001. He is the author of Between Somaliland and Puntland: Marginalization, Militarization and Conflicting Political Visions (Nairobi: Rift Valley Institute) and the co-editor of Dynamics of Identification and Conflict: Anthropological encounters (New York: Berghahn).

Bibliography:

ACLED 2021: A Turbulent Run-up to Elections in Somalia. https://acleddata.com/2021/04/07/a-turbulent-run-up-to-elections-in-somalia/

Bakonyi, Jutta 2022: War’s Everyday: Normalizing Violence and Legitimizing Power. Partecipazione&Conflitto Vol. 15, No. 1: 121-138

EASO 2021: Country of Origin Information Report: Somalia Security situation. https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/2021_09_EASO_COI_Report_Somalia_Security_situation.pdf

Elmi, Afyare 2021: The Politics of the Electoral System in Somalia: An Assessment. Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies: Vol. 21: 99-113, available at: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/bildhaan/vol21/iss1/10

Gaas, Mohamed Husein and Stig Jarle Hansen 2022: A Near End to Somalia’s Election Conundrum? RAAD Policy Brief 1:2022.

Hoehne, Markus Virgil and Mohammed Hussein Gaas 2022: Political Islam in Somalia: From underground movements to the rise and continued resilience of Al Shabaab, in J.-N. Bach and Aleksi Ylönen (eds.): Routledge Handbook of the Horn of Africa. London: Routledge, pp. 411-427.

Ibrahim,Ahmed Sheikh 2018: The Shari’a Courts of Mogadishu: Beyond “African Islam” and

“Islamic Law”.  Dissertation, the Graduate Faculty in Anthropology, City University of New York.

Somalia Corruption Report July 2020, available at: https://www.ganintegrity.com/portal/country-profiles/somalia/

The New Humanitarian 12 May 2022: Gun prices soar ahead of Somalia’s presidential elections https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news/2022/05/12/gun-prices-soar-ahead-of-somalias-presidential-elections

VOA 30.10.2009: Waste Dumping off Somali Coast May Have Links to Mafia, Somali Warlords, available at: https://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-2005-03-15-voa34/306247.html

Cite as: Hoehne, Markus Virgil. 2022. “Perpetuating conflict through democratization: Presidential elections in Somalia.“ FocaalBlog, 13 May. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/05/13/markus-virgil-hoehne-perpetuating-conflict-through-democratization-presidential-elections-in-somalia/

Features, The Political Power of Energy Futures

Pauline Destrée: Solar for the Few: Stranded Renewables and Green Enclaves in Ghana

Africa’s Green Energy Revolution

This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and Kirsten W. Endres (MPI Halle).

In the past ten years, calls for a “green revolution” on the African continent have cast optimistic and promising scenarios of “leapfrogging” to mass renewable energy generation in order to meet the continent’s targets for electrification and forecast growth for energy demand. With a population expected to increase by 800 million by 2040 with rising urbanisation, the most pressing challenge for the continent in the next 20 years will be to meet growing energy demand in a context of partially-present and unreliable infrastructure (IEA 2019). Renewables have been positioned as a technological messiah of development, enabling the continent to “leapfrog” traditional models of centralized grid-based electricity distribution and to radically green its economies (IRENA 2015). The IRENA 2030 roadmap for Africa’s renewable energy, for instance, suggests that renewables could in the next 20 years constitute half of Africa’s total energy mix (IRENA 2015) – pending an estimated USD $70 billion investment a year. Yet current solar PV installed capacity on the continent only accounts for 5GW, or one percent of the global total (around 600GW) (IEA 2019). Visions of a renewable “energy renaissance” (Olopade 2015, 15) in Africa remain blighted by the current reliance and increasing dependence of African countries on imported oil and fossil-based energy use, and of the continued (and new) opportunities for oil and gas extraction. In turn, discourses of energy transition and leapfrogging, with their unilinear trajectories and singular vision of a low-carbon future, tend to obscure the local specificities and histories of energy systems like Ghana’s, for whom renewable energy, in the form of hydropower, has long been its main source of energy generation.

Photo of a rural landscape with dam in the distance.
Image 1: Akosombo Dam. Akosombo, Ghana. 2016. Photo by author

In this post, I look at the contested politics of renewable energy in Ghana through a focus on the rise of “corporate solar” during an energy crisis. Ten years ago, shortly after the country discovered oil in large quantities along the coast of the Western Region, it embarked on an ambitious renewable energy path by passing the Renewable Energy Act (2011) (Act 832). The Act aimed to promote and develop the country’s renewable energy resources to ensure the country’s energy security, indigenous capacity and sustainable development. Ghana’s initial target was to increase the renewable electricity generation share, currently at less than one percent, to ten percent by 2020 (Sakah et al. 2017). Ghana thus positioned itself as West Africa’s new “energy frontier”, ushering in a resurgence of fossil extractivism paired with ambitious support for renewable energy technologies (Degani, Chalfin, and Cross 2020). In the midst of oil and gas discoveries, renewables have become a strategic, moving target conveniently reformulated to fit political agenda and rhetoric (Obeng-Darko 2019). For reasons of space, I will not elaborate on the ways in which new oil production came to stymie the growth of renewables. Instead, I provide a snapshot of solar power’s new corporate contours of energy privilege in Accra. I identify the emergence of a “renewable divide” in urban Ghana through the rise of “green enclaves” mostly enjoyed by corporate bodies and wealthy individuals. Building on the recent literature in the anthropology of energy challenging the “fantasy” of solar as a promise of democratic energy access (Szeman and Barney 2021), I consider how energy disparities endure under the transition to cleaner and renewable energy sources.

Moratorium on the Future: Renewables as Stranded Assets

In 2019, at an event on renewable energy opportunities for the private sector, a representative from the Renewable and Alternative Energy department at the Ministry of Energy made an unpopular announcement. Referring to the 2011 Renewable Energy Act, he declared that Ghana was not only on track to meet its target for 10% of total energy generated by renewables, but that it had met its target “long ago”, since the Akosombo Dam, which was built in 1966 by Kwame Nkrumah and accounts for 27% of the country’s total capacity, was technically a source of renewable energy.

Invoking the country’s proud history of electrification through the Akosombo Dam – a key project in Nkrumah’s vision for African industrialization and self-sufficiency (Miescher 2014) – and its negligible contribution to global carbon emissions, he declared the matter closed. Rather than seeking to please international conventions that did not adequately capture Ghana’s place in the global responsibility framework for climate change mitigation measures, he concluded that Ghana, like other African countries, would do well to focus instead on providing enough power for its people and industries.

Renewable energy companies’ representatives, entrepreneurs and analysts were shocked by the Minister’s backtracking commitment. That same year, as a result of overcapacity on the national grid, the government had issued a moratorium on PPAs (power purchase agreements), banning any addition to its grid until 2027. Since then, utility-scale renewable energy projects have come to a stall, leaving many with “stranded assets” and uncertainty about the future viability of large-scale solar PV and wind farms in the country. Of course, the Minister wasn’t technically wrong to claim the Akosombo Dam as a source of substantial renewable energy in the country’s electricity generation mix. To the renewable energy industry, however, it was perceived as a betrayal of the prevailing understanding that the target referred to additional capacity-building, mostly in the form of solar PVs and wind turbines.

Image 2: Painted advertisement for solar equipment. 2016. Accra, Ghana. Photo by author
Image 3: Painted advertisement for solar equipment. 2016. Accra, Ghana. Photo by author

Corporate Solar & The Renewable Divide

The moratorium on renewable energy PPAs exacerbated the inequalities that solar power has created in Ghana’s energyscape. Today, the largest clients for solar companies in Ghana are banks, hotels and factories – corporate bodies that have the capital for upfront costs. Following the frequent blackouts during the energy crisis that best the country in 2014-2016 (locally known as “Dumsor”), and the steep increase in electricity tariffs, many businesses, particularly factories in the industrial zones, switched to distributed generation, adopting solar as a “commercial strategy” to reduce their costs of manufacturing. “Dumsor” is Twi for “off-on”, a shorthand for the power outages that have become increasingly common in the country; today, the word has come to index a more general situation of disenchantment with infrastructure delivery and political expediency. Solar energy companies were quick to capitalise on the crisis as a business opportunity. In 2016, when I was researching Dumsor for my PhD thesis, I spoke to the representative of an Indian solar company with a large global presence who told me that initial investments in solar energy in Ghana prior to the crisis had been minimal because the power sector was “too good” and “too stable” for profit, compared to countries like Nigeria or Egypt that had more frequent power cuts and thus a bigger potential market.

In the turn to solar as a panacea for crisis, large corporate bodies removed their operations from the national grid, alternating between distributed solar and diesel-powered generator sets. This commercialization of distributed solar has further strained the financial situation of the national utilities, heavily dependent on industrial consumers’ revenues to subsidize residential low consumers. This has resulted in higher electricity tariffs for urban residential consumers, making electricity increasingly unaffordable to many. The capacity to switch to solar during a moment of crisis revealed new forms of energy privilege that take place outside the grid. In turn, the adoption of solar by a select elite (cf. Günel 2021) has further exacerbated the conditions of energy inequalities and precarity that many Accra residents live under. In the low-income neighbourhood of Western Accra where I have been doing fieldwork since 2014, this “renewable divide”, as we may call it, crossed two types of association. My neighbours and interlocutors perceived rooftop solar as a luxury item unaffordable to most, or as a humanitarian good reinforcing unequal trajectories of transition between the global North and the global South.

Here, “corporate solar” coexists with the “developmental” deployment of small-scale solar (in the form of solar lanterns and mini-grids) introduced by NGOs and small social enterprises in rural areas. The parallel trajectories of corporate and non-profit interests may appear surprising, operating as they do in divergent moral economies. Both types of solar projects, however, are driven by the same material, political and economic advantages of solar, as a form of cheap, reliable and distributed generation that offers autonomy from the inefficiencies of state infrastructure (Cross 2019, 54).

In effect, both “developmental” and “corporate” solar contribute to what may be called the creation of “green enclaves” in the energy landscape of Ghana, pockets of autonomous, renewable energy that serve both corporate and humanitarian rationales. I borrow the term “green enclave” from an engineer of the Volta River Authority (VRA) responsible for the hydropower generation plant at the Akosombo Dam that provides a large part of Ghana’s generation capacity. At a convention for renewable energy in Accra in 2019, he described to me plans to install solar panels on the roofs of Parliament, ministries, and the residential facilities at the Akosombo dam as “the greening of our enclaves”, a term that fittingly describes the infrastructural model of renewable energy at large in the country. It is not surprising that the Minister who had conveniently re-adjusted Ghana’s renewable energy target himself had solar panels installed on his house.

In a context of widespread energy precarity, solar in urban Ghana has exacerbated inequalities of access to reliable and affordable electricity, creating “green” geographies of inequality, energy security, and privilege.

Image 4: Solar panel business. 2019. Accra, Ghana. Photo by author

Conclusion: Energy Transitions in perspective

Ghana’s case-study has important implications for understanding energy transitions around the world. In popular discourses of energy transitions, the replacement of fossil fuel dependencies by renewable energy sources seems both inevitable and imperative. Calls for a renewable energy revolution in Africa are appealing, but they too often assume that renewables come to fill a gap, a lack, or an evidential need – in other words, that their benefits are too self-evident to forgo. Renewables, in this case, belong to the future – and fossil fuels to the past. In many ways, Ghana presents an inverse scenario of this dominant model of transition. Having powered most of its electricity needs with hydropower, it is now switching to increased reliance on thermal power plants and an oil economy. Further, this past of renewable energy through hydropower is today invoked to encourage a rush for oil and gas exploitation. In discussions with energy officials, policymakers, and the general public, I am repeatedly reminded that “Ghana is a low emitter”, bearing no responsibility to global greenhouse gas emissions. For a country that relied until recently entirely on hydropower for electricity, yet currently faces issues of reliability and affordability (Eshun and Amoako-Tuffour 2016), “sustainability” appears as a secondary concern to more pressing issues of overcapacity and improving access to reliable and affordable power. In turn, the adoption of renewables may not primarily be motivated by questions of environmental ideology, but also as a convenient (if privileged) solution to crisis. Accounting for the political potential of renewable energy futures around the world will demand that we grapple with the contradictory, divergent and conflicted visions and temporalities of energy transitions, and the relations between crisis and capital, privilege and poverty through which they come into being. 

Pauline Destrée is a Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. She is a member of the ERC-funded research project Energy Ethics. Her research explores energy, extraction, climate change, gender and race in Ghana.

Twitter: @PaulineDestree https://twitter.com/PaulineDestree

Bibliography

Cross, Jamie. 2019. “The Solar Good: Energy Ethics in Poor Markets.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 25 (S1): 47–66.

Degani, Michael, Brenda Chalfin, and Jamie Cross. 2020. “Introduction: Fuelling Capture: Africa’s Energy Frontiers.” The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 38 (2): 1–18.

Eshun, Maame Esi, and Joe Amoako-Tuffour. 2016. “A Review of the Trends in Ghana’s Power Sector.” Energy, Sustainability and Society 6 (1): 9.

Günel, Gökçe. 2021. “Leapfrogging to Solar.” South Atlantic Quarterly 120 (1): 163–75.

IEA. 2019. “Africa Energy Outlook 2019.” Paris: IEA.

IRENA. 2015. “Africa 2030: Roadmap for a Renewable Energy Future.” Abu Dhabi: IRENA.

Miescher, Stephan. 2014. “‘Nkrumah’s Baby’: The Akosombo Dam and the Dream of Development in Ghana, 1952–1966.” Water History 6 (4): 341–66.

Obeng-Darko, Nana Asare. 2019. “Why Ghana Will Not Achieve Its Renewable Energy Target for Electricity. Policy, Legal and Regulatory Implications.” Energy Policy 128 (May): 75–83.

Olopade, Dayo. 2015. The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa. Reprint edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt USA.

Sakah, Marriette, Felix Amankwah Diawuo, Rolf Katzenbach, and Samuel Gyamfi. 2017. “Towards a Sustainable Electrification in Ghana: A Review of Renewable Energy Deployment Policies.” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 79 (November): 544–57.

Szeman, Imre, and Darin Barney. 2021. “Introduction: From Solar to Solarity.” South Atlantic Quarterly 120 (1): 1–11.

Cite as: Destrée, Pauline. 2021. “Solar for the Few: Stranded Renewables and Green Enclaves in Ghana.” FocaalBlog, 9 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/09/pauline-destree-solar-for-the-few-stranded-renewables-and-green-enclaves-in-ghana/

Features, How Capitalists Think

Tijo Salverda: Aiming to keep capitalist accumulation in check: The role of the global land rush’s fiercest critics

This post is part of a feature on “How Capitalists Think,” moderated and edited by Patrick Neveling (University of Bergen) and Tijo Salverda (University of Cologne).

Following the concurrent 2007/2008 financial crisis and the global food crisis, investors’ appetite for (agricultural) land around the world has increased considerably. As a consequence, rural residents have been pushed off their lands, or their movements have been restricted because of new forms of enclosure (White et al. 2012), leading to an outpour of concerns about the “global land rush.” Critics such as international peasant movements, NGOs, journalists, (activist) scholars, and, in a more ambiguous way, international governance institutions have campaigned against the negative consequences of investors’ appetite for land. In particular, campaigns by GRAIN, Via Campesina, Global Witness, and Oxfam have increased awareness among the public. The extensive number of academic publications also demonstrates the scholarly attention devoted to the issue (e.g., Anseeuw et al. 2012; Borras 2016; Zoomers et al. 2016).

Continue reading →

Features, How Capitalists Think

Georg Materna: “Two tribes of capitalists”: Neoconomists and politiconomists in a Senegalese marketplace

This post is part of a feature on “How Capitalists Think,” moderated and edited by Patrick Neveling (University of Bergen) and Tijo Salverda (University of Cologne).

Research on capitalism commonly distinguishes between neoclassical economics and political economy. If neoclassical economics have dominated scientific debates since the 1930s at the latest, the nineteenth century view was that of political economy, with Karl Marx providing a powerful critique thereof. Both theories influence scientific reasoning until today. Yet, could both also elucidate the quotidian behavior of “normal” people in ethnographies of everyday life in the twenty-first century?

Continue reading →

Blog

Heike Becker: “Global 1968” on the African continent

Fifty years after student protests shook much of the Cold War world, in the “West” and in the “East,” “Global 1968” has become the catchphrase to describe these profound generational revolts. West Berlin, Paris, and Berkeley spring to mind prominently, and most memorable behind what was then the Iron Curtain were the events of the Prague Spring. For most commentators and scholars, these events in the Global North appear to have constituted “Global 1968.”

Continue reading →

Blog

Anna Hedlund: Sharp lines, blurred structures: Politics of wartime rape in armed conflict

Whenever there is armed conflict, sexual violence and rape, often against women and girls, soon emerge as central concerns in the global public. This is an important topic, as rape is often used as “a weapon of war.” It is a dangerous concern, nevertheless. Opposing war parties commonly develop public relations strategies aimed at exploiting the global concern over sexual violence. Further, “rape as a weapon of war” may be a false assumption, for it may overshadow other atrocities inherent in nearly all armed conflicts and the focus may be on rape as a selective phenomenon separated from the political and economic context.
Continue reading →

Modes of Production

Joe Trapido: Epochs and continents: Potlatch, articulation, and violence in the Congo

This post is part of the Modes of Production feature moderated and edited by Patrick Neveling and Joe Trapido.

From the sixteenth century onward, European trading networks grew ever more extensive. In some places, they displaced or directly subjugated the indigenous population early on. In others, merchants entered trading relationships with locals. In some parts of Asia, these traders interacted with forms of social organization that had affinities with Europe—dense populations with large merchant classes, and states that extracted tribute over large areas (Wolf 1997: 73–101). In other places, power and resources were distributed according to very different rules: in particular, wealth was more directly related to the person. This is not to say that these places lacked markets or currency;  they often held large markets and had an amazing diversity of objects for mediating transactions, but these objects are better seen as an element of, or adjunct to, the value of the person. I am calling such societies human modes of production.1
Continue reading →

Blog

Ruy Llera Blanes: Revolutionary states in Luanda: “Events” and political strife in Angola

Last 11 November, Angola celebrated forty years of independence—a memorable date. However, these celebrations have been overshadowed by a movement of contestation that has turned a spotlight on the local regime’s antidemocratic governing tactics. This text explores some intricacies of this process, using an “anthropology of events” as a device to account for the increasingly tense political environment in this country.
Continue reading →

Blog

Joe Trapido: Elections, politics, and power in central and southern Africa

The conference “Elections in central and southern Africa, dynamics of exclusion and participation,” at SOAS on 26 June 2015, prompts me to some personal reflections. Elections in central and southern Africa are marked by a paradoxical dynamic of participation and exclusion. Ostensible rituals of mass participation and of legitimation by civil power, electoral processes in the countries of the region have often made recourse to forms of exclusionary violence during campaigns. This is not, of course, unique—elections in Africa should not be seen as sui generis events. This exclusionary dynamic is well understood as a regional variant on a wider theme.
Continue reading →

Features, Music & Capitalism

Joseph Trapido: Music, ritual, and capitalism in west central African history

1 Comment

There was a strong relationship between music and political-economic power in the precolonial Congo basin. This was because music was an integral part of a ritual nexus that dominated social life. Those who controlled the ritual nexus became rich and powerful, and controlled trade between locals and an expanding capitalism (MacGaffey 2000). Here I will show how music was important to this interface.
Continue reading →