Social Change and Development 333: Africa  

After years of frustration at the stifling atmosphere of political correctness surrounding discussions of Africa, long time World Bank official Robert Calderisi speaks out. He boldly reveals how most of Africa's misfortunes are self-imposed, and why the world must now deal differently with the continent. Here we learn that Africa has steadily lost markets by its own mismanagement, that even capitalist countries are anti-business, that African family values and fatalism are more destructive than tribalism, and that African leaders prey intentionally on Western guilt. Calderisi exposes the shortcomings of foreign aid and debt relief, and proposes his own radical solutions.

This book reviews fifty years of research on politics in Africa. It synthesizes insights from different scholarly approaches and offers an original interpretation of the knowledge accumulated over the years. It discusses how research on African politics relates to the study of politics in other regions. It focuses on such key issues as the legacy of a movement approach to political change, the nature of the state, the economy of a location, the policy deficit, the agrarian question, gender and politics and ethnicity and conflict. It ends by reviewing what scholars agree upon and what the accumulated knowledge offers as insights for more effective political and policy reforms.

Within each volume, signed chapters that are fairly uniform in length focus on a specific country and provide a profile, a map, and information and statistics on education, employment, family and sexuality, health, politics and law, religion, and violence. Each chapter is rounded out by a brief outlook for the 21st century and a resource guide with suggested reading, videos/films, web sites, and organizations. The introduction to the chapter on women in the United States provides an insightful analysis of how women from the apparently disparate countries of the United States, Canada, and Mexico are interconnected through politics, economic globalization (NAFTA), and environmental change.

Within each volume, signed chapters that are fairly uniform in length focus on a specific country and provide a profile, a map, and information and statistics on education, employment, family and sexuality, health, politics and law, religion, and violence. Each chapter is rounded out by a brief outlook for the 21st century and a resource guide with suggested reading, videos/films, web sites, and organizations. The introduction to the chapter on women in the United States provides an insightful analysis of how women from the apparently disparate countries of the United States, Canada, and Mexico are interconnected through politics, economic globalization (NAFTA), and environmental change.

The set covers the modern history of the Middle East and North Africa, with major sections on Colonialism and Imperialism, the World Wars, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the United Nations involvement in the region. Each country in the region is reviewed, detailing its population, economy and government. With 3,000 nonpartisan articles written by specialists in anthropology, history, political science, religion andsocial sciences, this four-volume set is an indispensable tool in understanding the region's people, places, events and ideas.