Africa’s developed politics, the West’s underdeveloped interventions

* Spoiler alert: in the interests of brevity and clarity, I am going to make lots of huge generalisations throughout this blog * West is best? In Britain and the West more generally, there is a long-standing, entrenched, and powerful assumption that African politics is broken. One constantly comes across statements and arguments about […]

Africa and Development in the age of the SDGs

The Sustainable Development Goals encourage more and better aid. They also sustain a long-standing succession of big picture global aid visions which connect and conflate aid and development. This blog, taken from a keynote presentation, questions the merits of this conflation and offers some new and old pointers for development research outside of the aid-development […]

It’s not just about us

Europe endures a sporadic but constant stream of terrorist attacks in its cities. These are carried out by individuals or small groups. Larger attacks in London, Madrid and Paris involve bombings and mass shootings. Smaller attacks by individuals involve assaults and the running down of civilians. It is extremely easy to exaggerate these events, to […]

Endgame politics

This is a bad time to indulge in futurology. The presence of ‘shock’ political events encourages all kinds of hyperbolae. The historiography of predictive political analysis is an embarrassment of errors. Looking at a recent set of changes and announcing a ‘new’ something or other distracts from deeper continuities or similarities with times passed. Nevertheless. […]

Populism is the new panic

Populism is the new panic-word for the broad centre of liberal-democratic politics. This is in large part because of its association with the Right and even fascism. The populism of UKIP or Trump aims to create a homogenised constituency of ‘the people’, racialised and hostile to those outside their categorical borders. This is not to […]

#TotalEvent

A change? We entering an age of the Total Event, an age in which, occasionally but irregularly, we are sucked into political conjunctures that, for a time, envelop political discourse in a fashion that is novel and carries with it new or newish questions and issues.

Meeting Corbyn

A new politics? On the 19th August I attended a Corbyn for leader rally in Sheffield city centre. It was unusual to attend such a large rally of the Left and with such a positive atmosphere. Usually it takes something awful to get left-leaning people on the streets en masse: an anti-racism event, stop the […]