New publications

Cora Dekker initiated, trained and supervised community-based sociotherapy initiatives in Rwanda, East Congo and Liberia from 2005 to 2018. This handbook describes the process of training in four geographically and politically diverse areas where war had left deep scars. 

This volume, edited by Prof. Jon Abbink, discusses the problems and challenges of environmental–ecological conditions in Africa, amidst the current craze of economic growth and ‘development’. Africa’s significant economic dynamics and growth trajectories are marked by neglect of the environment, reinforcing ecological crises. Unless environmental–ecological and population growth problems are addressed as an integral part of developmental strategies and growth models, the crises will accelerate and lead to huge costs in later years.

This volume, edited by Prof. Mirjam de Bruijn, has appeared in French. The English version will follow later this year. Radicalisation has become a word depicting our world in negative colours. This book tries to understand what radicalisation means in the Sahel and in the Netherlands. Is it only negative? What diversity of social and political processes is behind this concept? Is there basically a desire for social change? 

Land Reform Revisited engages with contemporary debates on land reform and agrarian transformation in South Africa. The volume, edited by Femke Brandt & Grasian Mkodzongi and published in the Afrika-Studiecentrum Series, offers insights into post-apartheid transformation dynamics through the lens of agency and state making. The chapters have been written by emerging scholars whose analysis highlights the ways in which people negotiate and contest land reform realities and politics.

This book is based on Leonor Faber-Jonker’s research master's thesis, runner-up for the 2016 Africa Thesis Award. In September 2011 twenty Namibian skulls were repatriated from the collection of the Charité university hospital in Berlin. The remains had been in Germany for more than a hundred years: they belonged to victims of the 'German-Herero war' (1904-1908) in German South-West Africa. Faber-Jonker analyses how these human remains became war trophies, anthropological specimens, and, finally, evidence, symbols, and relics.