Trust and Trust-Making in Africa’s Global Connections

Trust and Trust-Making in Africa’s Global Connections is a thought-provoking book contributing to both African Studies and the study of trust in society. The volume provides rich ethnographic insights into the ways trust and trust-making shape Africans’ global encounters. It traces empirical foundations of trust and distrust, illustrates the wide variation in manifestations of trust-building, and critically positions these observations in the contemporary moment of global polycrisis. Trust and trust-making, we show, as these critically engage with global power relations, are acting both as a catalyst of harm and a potential source of positive change.

The book is volume 36 of the Africa-Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies Series and can be purchased at Brill Publishing.

 

 

 

 

Author(s) / editor(s)

Mayke Kaag, Alena Thiel, and István Tarrósy

About the author(s) / editor(s)

Mayke Kaag is Professor of the Anthropology of Politics and Governance in Africa at Leiden University, and Professor of the Anthropology of Islam in Africa and its Diaspora at the University of Amsterdam. Her work mainly focuses on Africa’s global connections in diverse fields.

Alena Thiel is an anthropologist whose work covers public sector digitalization, statistical production and the development of health information systems in Ghana. She recently published The Social Life of Health Data: Health Records and Knowledge Production in Ghana (Palgrave, 2024) with Samuel Ntewusu.

István Tarrósy is Professor of Political Science at the University of Pécs, Hungary, and Visiting Professor at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. He is director of the Africa Research Center and editor-in-chief of the Hungarian Journal of African Studies.

Posted on 22 April 2025, last modified on 22 April 2025