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This series is aimed at understanding the dynamics in the relationship between enduring conflict, hardship, governance regimes, connectivity in Africa. The first books of the series concentrate on Middle and West Africa, in particular in Cameroon, Chad, CAR, Nigeria, Congo-Brazzaville, DRC, Uganda and Mali; a region with a shared history of connectivity, of oppression and conflict (duress). Within the region the variation in these two variables and its comparisons highlight processes and dynamics of socio-political change, and of agency (the ways of people to act, react, experience). The series uses an interdisciplinary methodology, combining anthropology, history, communication studies, conflict studies, and social geography. Publications are comparative and complementary, among diverse mobile populations in urban centers, refugee camps, and remote rural areas and of different types of relations between duress and changing communication technologies. The main concepts Duress and Connectivity need explanation. Duress is the internalization of conflict/oppression, and combines the long history of such circumstances, their recurrence, with a perspective on (constrained) agency, emotions, and socio-political change. Connectivity encompasses all forms of connectivity, from geographical mobility to communication, in which the role of technologies of communication (from roads to mobile phones) are present. In this series we focus on the interplay between the changes and continuities in connectivity and the way it (re/trans)forms duress.
More specifically, the publications in this series concentrate on (a) how, through new communication and information flows people's experience of duress changes; (b) how new opportunities to be informed, to communicate, and connect, influence individual decision making and the (re)forming of communities; and (c) how these changes influence power relations and existing hierarchies. An important goal is to contextualize these seemingly 'revolutionary' and 'new' changes related to the introduction of new technologies in a historical longue durée_perspective, relating developments in connectivity to older connectivity processes in the history of African regions.
The series will be in conversation with various fields in the social sciences and humanities: Studies of migration, displacement, refugees; Studies of the history of conflict; Conflict studies; Ethnography of mobility, Mobility turn in Geography (Urry et al.), and in the methodological field with Digital Ethnography and Digital Humanities.
Advisory Board:
Prof. Khalil Alio, University of Ndjaména
Dr. Henrietta Nyamnjoh, Independent Researcher
Prof. Marie-Soleil Frère, Universite de Bruxelles
Prof. Bruce Mutsvairo
Dr. Katrien Pype, University of Leuven
Prof. Andrea Behrends, University of Bayreuth
Prof. Abdou Salam Fall, IFAN, University Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar
Prof. Rijk van Dijk, University of Leiden,
Dr. Shamil Jeppie, University of Cape Town
Prof. Han van Dijk, Wageningen University
Prof. Thomas Moloniy, Director African Studies Centre Edinburgh
Prof. Ayo Ojebode, University of Ibadan
Dr. Joris Schapendonk, Nijmegen University
About the author
Jonna Both, University of Leiden, Netherlands.
