Publications

Physical mobility of people from place to place as individuals or as groups is essentially horizontal, potentially limitless, and generally motivated by the desire and ambition to take advantage of new opportunities for self or group advancement. This mobility is the basis of...

Will people in drylands be forced to migrate due to climate change and environmental degradation? And what impact does migration have on the environment and development in the migrants' home and destination areas? These are some of the questions this study tries to...

The 1992 Boipatong massacre has been widely recognized as a key moment in the South African transition. The massacre is also frequently cited as an example of state complicity in the political violence that shook the country during a period of negotiation and reform. Yet,...

Based on rich and wide-ranging data, the thesis describes the sensitive issue of the contemporary emancipation trajectories of agro-pastoralist Fulbe in Central Mali. It explores how people are currently dealing with hierarchies they inherited from past master-slave relations...

The recent conflict in Côte d'Ivoire has led to the militarization of many young civilians on both belligerent sides, especially in the west of the country. What is of particular interest is that many of these youths have assumed a function of 'commuting'...

In this inaugural address the author, director of the African Studies Centre Leiden since 2010, first gives an impression of how Africans themselves perceive change and development, based on recent research in Ghana and Burkina Faso. He then presents some positive statistical...

Most of what is written about Africa is framed in terms that have been out of date for years. Too often it is seen as heading for either disaster or salvation; the realities are more subtle, more complicated than this binary opposition suggests. The continent has over the...

In Ethiopia, as in other parts of Africa, relations between Christians and Muslims show a new dynamic under the impact of both state policies and global connections. Religious identities are becoming more dominant as people’s primary public identity, and...

In 1916 a warlord named Oorlog - 'war', in Afrikaans - moved into the Kaokoveld in the far north-west of what is now Namibia, and drove off the original inhabitants. Shortly after, Oorlog was formally recognized as a chief by the newly established South African...

This collective volume explores the ways in which Africa's engagements with an increasingly multipolar world are being reshaped, and, on whose terms. Ch. 2-7 examine new trends in Africa. Ch. 8-13 address the forces, in particular interventions by China, India and the US...

Afrika heeft in de afgelopen eeuw de snelste bevolkingsgroei beleefd in de geschiedenis van onze planeet. Dit heeft niet alleen geleid tot een enorme druk op mens en milieu, maar het heeft ook immense verandering gebracht in de economische logica van het continent. Een...

Although communities are still often conceptually bound to geographical place, transnational studies in the 1990s have led to viewing a community more as a network than as a place. This contribution expands this argument by developing the idea of "strings of people...

This book reflects the intellectual encounter over the years between a group of Dutch scholars studying the relations between Ancient Greece, Egypt and Africa and Martin Gardiner Bernal who, from the 1980s onwards, has claimed that the roots of Western civilization are to be...