Passageways of cooperation: mutual help in post-socialist Tanzania

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 267This paper will examine the patterns and discourses of sharing and cooperation as well as broader moralities and freedoms that are reproduced in Kuria mutual help groups. It is based on 32 months of ethnographic field research in Tarime and Serengeti districts of Mara region that investigated local patterns of cooperation and the emerging modes of personhood within the novel associational environments.2 The study argues that the systemic dynamic of Kuria cooperative groups should not be sought in the additive accumulation of material wealth or undisputed reproduction of social solidarity, but rather in historically defined processes of extending one’s self through social ties of interdependence. Such relational dynamics of informality also illuminate the emerging public spaces and socialities in globalizing Tanzanian communities. The paper is structured to provide an overview of different forms of Kuria cooperation in historical as well as contemporary perspectives, and situate these in a broader framework of culturally relevant exchanges and moralities. The first part of the study discusses the social organization of Kuria mutual help, analyzing its connections with descent and age organization and other variables relevant for its mobilization. It explores transformations in local mutual help forms and discusses the dynamics of contemporary Kuria work and savings groups that proliferate in commercializing local communities. Tendencies toward greater formalization of work reciprocities and the emergence of new categories of peers are explored. The evolution of Kuria mutual help is placed in the context of comparative ethnographic evidence of recent transformations of collective work in Africa. The second part of the study examines the construction of Kuria persons through public collective activities, situating these within the transformed materiality of socially significant exchanges and transfers. Socially relevant forms of savings and accumulation that affect mutuality and their historical transformations are explored. Changes in gendered savings and work profiles are also discussed. The study also examines novel forms of cooperation in community peacekeeping, revealing Kuria vigilantism as another important associational area of the local informality

Land mortgage: a device for rural restructuring in transitional settings?

Daivi Rodima-Taylor explores the evolution of land mortgage in African countries

Introduction:ʿAjamī literacies of Africa: the Hausa, Fula, Mandinka, and Wolof traditions

African ʿAjamī literatures hold a wealth of knowledge on the history and intellectual traditions of the region but are largely unknown to the larger public. Our special issue seeks to enhance a broader understanding of this important part of the Islamic world, exploring the ʿAjamī literatures and literacies of four main language groups of Muslim West Africa: Hausa, Mandinka, Fula, and Wolof. Through increasing access to primary sources in ʿAjamī and utilizing an innovative multimedia approach, our research contributes to an interpretive and comparative analysis of African ʿAjamī literacy, with its multiple purposes, forms, and custodians. Our Editorial Introduction to the special issue discusses the building blocks and historical development of ʿAjamī cultures in West Africa, outlines the longitudinal collaborative research initiatives that our special issue draws upon, and explores the challenges and opportunities for participatory knowledge-making that accompany the rise of digital technologies in the study of African literatures and literacies.Accepted manuscrip

Remittance flows to post-conflict states: perspectives on human security and development

This repository item contains a single issue of the Pardee Center Task Force Reports, a publication series that began publishing in 2009 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.Migrant remittances – that is, money or other goods sent to relatives in the country of origin– play an increasingly central role in post-conflict reconstruction and national development of conflict-affected states. Private remittances are of central importance for restoring stability and enhancing human security in post-conflict countries. Yet the dynamics of conflict-induced remittance flows and the possibilities of leveraging remittances for post-conflict development have been sparsely researched to date. This Pardee Center Task Force Report is the outcome of an interdisciplinary research project organized by the Boston University Center for Finance, Law & Policy, in collaboration with The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. The Task Force was convened by Boston University development economist John R. Harris and international banking expert Donald F. Terry, and social anthropologist Daivi Rodima-Taylor, Visiting Researcher at the Boston University African Studies Center, served as lead researcher and editor for the report. The Task Force was asked to research, analyze, and propose policy recommendations regarding the role of remittances in post-conflict environments and their potential to serve as a major source of development funds. The report’s authors collectively suggest a broader approach to remittance institutions that provides flexibility to adapt to specific local practices and to make broader institutional connections in an era of growing population displacement and expanding human and capital flows. Conditions for more productive use of migrants’ remittances are analyzed while drawing upon case studies from post-conflict countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The papers in this Task Force Report establish the importance of remittances for sustaining local livelihoods as well as rehabilitating institutional infrastructures and improving financial inclusion in post-conflict environments. Highlighting the increasing complexity of global remittance systems, the report examines the growing informality of conflict-induced remittance flows and explores solutions for more efficient linkages between financial institutions of different scales and degrees of formality. It discusses challenges to regulating international remittance transfers in the context of growing concerns about transparency, and documents the increasing role of diaspora networks and migrant associations in post-conflict co-development initiatives. The Task Force Report authors outline the main challenges to leveraging remittances for post-conflict development and make recommendations for further research and policy applications

Repoliticizing the technological turn in sustainability governance:Moralities, power, space

This article Introduces a theme issue on ‘Repoliticizing the technological turn in sustainability governance’. The collection examines the spatial politics implicit in what we call the ‘technological turn’ in sustainability governance: the increasingly frequent resort to experiments with novel technologies to govern myriad sustainability challenges. This article introduces the articles in the collection and outlines three core themes addressed across the issue: How the technological turn often centres on articulating new forms of legibility at a distance; the ways that experiments with new technologies articulate new kinds of relationships across space and across the public/private boundary; and the implications of these changes for questions of accountability, power, and decision-making.</p

Introduction: mutual help in an era of uncertainty

Global Challenges (FSW

Introduction: ʿAjamī literacies of Africa: the Hausa, Fula, Mandinka, and Wolof traditions

First author draf

The veil of transparency : blockchain and sustainability governance in global supply chains

This article interrogates the turn towards digital technologies for addressing sustainability challenges in global supply chains. Focusing on the case of blockchains, we assess industry claims that this set of distributed ledger technologies for undertaking, verifying, and publishing digital transactions provides the greater transparency necessary to resolve sustainability challenges. Our central contention is that blockchain-based initiatives to promote sustainability in global supply chains double-down on modes of third-party audit and disclosure governance that have thus far failed to address labour and environmental abuses. The turn towards these digital technologies, we show, extends interlinked processes of managerialization and the spread of ‘audit culture’ in the governance of global supply chains. These tendencies heighten obstacles to enhancing sustainability across global supply chains, exacerbating the very challenges blockchain initiatives are ostensibly meant to address. Worse than not fundamentally addressing sustainability problems, applications of this set of ‘sustech’ render failures to address sustainability abuses more opaque. The technological novelty of blockchain helps to construct what we call a ‘veil of transparency’ over sustainability abuses and marginalities in and across global supply chains

Interrogating technology-led experiments in sustainability governance

Solutions to global sustainability challenges are increasingly technology‐intensive. Yet, technologies are neither developed nor applied to governance problems in a socio‐political vacuum. Despite aspirations to provide novel solutions to current sustainability governance challenges, many technology‐centred projects, pilots and plans remain implicated in longer‐standing global governance trends shaping the possibilities for success in often under‐recognized ways. This article identifies three overlapping contexts within which technology‐led efforts to address sustainability challenges are evolving, highlighting the growing roles of: (1) private actors; (2) experimentalism; and (3) informality. The confluence of these interconnected trends illuminates an important yet often under‐recognized paradox: that the use of technology in multi‐stakeholder initiatives tends to reduce rather than expand the set of actors, enhancing instead of reducing challenges to participation and transparency, and reinforcing rather than transforming existing forms of power relations. Without recognizing and attempting to address these limits, technology‐led multi‐stakeholder initiatives will remain less effective in addressing the complexity and uncertainty surrounding global sustainability governance. We provide pathways for interrogating the ways that novel technologies are being harnessed to address long‐standing global sustainability issues in manners that foreground key ethical, social and political considerations and the contexts in which they are evolving

Hybrid materialities, power, and expertise in the era of general purpose technologies

This article proposes three distinct perspectives on and approaches to the study of hybridisation across society, industries, and academia enabled by General Purpose Technologies like AI and blockchain. The term hybridisation is frequently invoked to describe and prescribe human-machine interaction and technological interoperability. Critically assessing processes of hybridisation through the perspectives of (1) materiality, (2) power and (3) expertise, we argue that the language of hybridity smoothens out frictions between human judgment, on the one hand, and automated decision-making, on the other, and that processes of hybridisation veil technology-induced epistemic and economic inequalities. In each of these perspectives, we draw on fieldwork conducted at different sites where general-purpose technologies are in play