New publications

With a mixture of pride and sadness we announce that the last book by our late colleague Stephen Ellis has just been published: This Present Darkness: A History of Nigerian Organised Crime. Nigerians have acquired an unfortunate reputation for involvement in drug-trafficking, fraud, cyber-crime and other types of criminal activity. Successful Nigerian criminal networks have a global reach, interacting with their Italian, Latin American and Russian counterparts. The book describes Nigerian organised crime from its origins in the last years of colonial rule, to the moment it went global.

Since the end of the Suharto regime in 1998, Indonesia has been increasingly confident of its abilities in the international system. As the largest economy in Southeast Asia and with the fourth largest population in the world, with over 255 million people in 2015, Indonesia has increasingly made its voice heard, in particular in issues connected to the Global South. Read the new Infosheet.

This book, a co-publication of the ASCL and IFRA (Institut Français de Recherche en Afrique), is the first to consequently use quantitative data in addition to qualitative data about violence in Nigeria in very different fields: from oil production to cattle breeding, radical Islam to motor accidents, land conflicts to witchcraft; quantitative data that was previously unavailable or inaccessible. The authors underline the necessity of a trend analysis to decipher the patterns and the complexity of violence in these fields. Open access!

The Netherlands has been an active supporter of international development aid. Dutch development cooperation started in response to Truman’s 'Four point programme' announced in 1949. It began as technical assistance, channelled through multilateral channels. Bilateral aid started in 1962 and was introduced by (then) Minister for Development Cooperation Berend-Jan Udink. Since then, the priorities, target countries and budget of Dutch development cooperation have continuously shifted. This thematic map illustrates how the partner countries for Dutch development cooperation have changed throughout the years.

The research project 'Defining, targeting and reaching the very poor' has resulted in field reports on Bangladesh, Benin, Jeldu (Ethiopia), Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) and a synthesis report. Anika Altaf is a PhD candidate whose research aims to discover how extremely poor people can benefit on a long-term basis from poverty-alleviation initiatives. In addition, she attempts to find out who the ultra poor are and what struggles they face.