Ebenezer Obadare
Biographic Data
| ID | 135819 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ebenezer Obadare |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ebenezer |
| FAMILY NAME | Obadare |
| SIGNATURE | OBADARE E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Kansas |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 58 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 252 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 51 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 7 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Conflicting Signals on Africa’s Democratic Predicament
Despite elections being held across the continent, coup leaders and other foes of liberal democracy have seized on disenchantment with poor governance and economic frustrations to renew old debates about whether Africa needs a different kind of political system suited to its supposed cultural differences
Topographies of African Spirituality
This book explores African spirituality inside and outside of religion, investigating African traditions and perceptions in the study of spirituality across Africa and the African diaspora. It provides an interdisciplinary reflection on key issues in the field and sheds light on everyday experiences. In particular, the volume celebrates the work and mentorship of Professor Jacob K. Olupona, a leading figure in the study of African spiritualities,…
Religious Plurality in Africa
Citadels of Crisis
Once highly regarded as centers of excellence, Nigerian universities now uniformly occupy the basement of most global university rankings. At the same time, the nation’s academia is all but shorn of the social prestige that previously attached to it. This essay argues that neither the specific degradation of the professoriate, nor the broader crisis of higher education, can be understood without attention to the crisis of the postcolonial Nigeria…
Introduction
Ebenezer Obadare ([email protected]) is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Kansas and Research Fellow at the Research Institute for Theology and Religion, University of South Africa. His latest book is Pentecostal republic: Religion and the struggle for state power in Nigeria (Zed Books, London, 2018). December is typically a month of fevered agitation in Nigeria. It is, for one thing, a month motorists have come to associate with fuel sh…
On the theologico-theatrical
Nigerian Pentecostalism continues to assume many of the externalities of popular culture in the country, creating a unique composite of spirituality and secular entertainment. In an emergent trend, church leaders invite popular entertainers into church services and other church-related events with the declared aim of energizing their congregations. Where does the imperative in Nigerian Pentecostalism to outsource the work of inspiration to perfor…
A Hashtag Revolution in Nigeria
Exploding in October 2020 and reverberating internationally, protests against police brutality under the hashtag #EndSARS exposed enduring patterns and emergent trends in Nigerian politics and society. This article examines various elements of the protests to advance hypotheses about the culture of social media, the weakening of old forms of solidarity, and the rise of a new generation of activists steeped in new rules and technologies of civic e…
Professor Ian Taylor, 1969-2021
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Christianity, Sexuality and Citizenship in Africa
Ethics and Society in Nigeria
Nigeria's Two Decades of Zero-Sum Democracy
[T]he more distant the experience of military rule, the greater has been society's reconciliation to the reality of democracy as the only game in town
Pentecostal Republic
“Throughout its history, Nigeria has been plagued by religious divisions. Tensions have only intensified since the restoration of democracy in 1999, with the divide between Christian south and Muslim north playing a central role in the country’s electoral politics, as well as manifesting itself in the religious warfare waged by Boko Haram. Through the lens of Christian–Muslim struggles for supremacy, Ebenezer Obadare charts the turbulent course o…
Laughter as the Best Medicine
Civil society has been defined as a realm of social interaction between economy and the state, made up above all of the personal sphere (particularly the family), the field of associations (principally voluntary organisations), social movements, and types of public communications. It has also been described as the area of social association in society as distinct fromthe state, involving networks of bodies through which society and groups within …
Christianity, sexuality and citizenship in Africa
Citizenship in sub-Saharan Africa has undergone profound changes in recent decades as part of wider social and political dynamics. One notable development is the emergence of Christianity, especially in its Pentecostal-Charismatic forms, as a public religion. Christian actors, beliefs and practices have increasingly come to manifest themselves in the public sphere, actively engage with politics, define narratives of nationhood and shape notions o…
The Charismatic porn-star
Work on the sexual dimension of citizenship in Africa has privileged the way contemporary struggles over sexualities and sexual identities have opened up tensions over belonging and civic mattering. This article focuses on how political subjectivity is shaped and determined against the backdrop of the erotic economy between the pastor and his congregation. Mobilizing the idea of a Pentecostal erotic economy to evoke a debate around gender, patria…
A word from the new editors
Last year, we were approached with an offer to succeed Leo Villalon and Paul Nugent as co-editors of the Journal of Modern African Studies
A Nigerian President's Disappointing Return
Muhammadu Buhari, who made bold promises to clean up the political system and put the economy on a firmer footing, has dashed high expectations with his directionless leadership
Response to ‘Similarity and Difference, Context and Tradition, in Contemporary Religious Movements in West Africa’ by J. D. Y. Peel
In the immediate aftermath of ‘9/11’, it took very little for the axiom that adherents of evangelical Christianity and reformist Islam inhabit discrepant, permanently warring publics to solidify. With the very air laden with ‘the clash of civilizations’, the dominant narrative quickly became one of mutual antagonism, in which both religions were positioned as irreconcilably foundational in major global conflicts. As is often the case in such mome…
Africa's Emergent Public Sphere
[There] appears to be a generally more assertive public sphere, with an ebullience strikingly in excess of the technological resources at its disposal. Seventh in a series on public spheres around the world
Governance and the Crisis of Rule in Contemporary Africa
This volume advances the discussions of leadership in Africa's specific history, culture, economy, and politics. The book promotes an understanding of leadership and its paradoxes and illuminates the
The Muslim response to the Pentecostal surge in Nigeria
The paper postulates the emergence of a charismatic form of Islam in Western Nigeria, indexed by new modalities of prayer, modes of worship and proselytizing, organizational features, and repertoires of devotion that closely approximate forms and expressions normally exclusively associated with Pentecostal Christianity. It is argued that this new formation of Islam, while apparently triggered by Pentecostalism's recent success in a competitive re…
Sex, citizenship and the state in Nigeria
In this article, the author uses the belligerence toward alternative sexualities in Nigeria as a point of departure for a critical appraisal of the terms of inclusion and exclusion in the country's body politic. This belligerence has thrown up a rare alliance of the state, religious leaders and the print media. Attributing this alliance to the postcolonial crisis over the functions of masculinisation and power, the author suggests that anti-gay r…
Divining the Self
The Handbook of Civil Society in Africa
Civic Agency in Africa
Examines the variety of mostly unorganized and informal ways in which Africans exercise agency and resist state power in the 21st century, through citizen action and popular culture, and how the relationship between ruler and ruled is being reframed. The recent eruption of popular protests across North Africa and the Middle East has reopened academic debate on the meaning and strategies of resistance in the 21st century. This book argues that Wes…
The Uses of Ridicule
As post-military 'democratic' regimes across Africa perpetuate norms and practices that were characteristic of the previous openly authoritarian era, humour and ridicule have emerged as a means through which ordinary people attempt to deconstruct and construct meaning out of a reality that is decidedly surreal. In Nigeria jokes serve a double function as a tool for subordinate classes to deride the state (including its agents) and themselves. Jok…
A crisis of trust
In the middle of 2003, disagreement over the safety of the oral polio vaccine pitted ordinary citizens and community leaders in the predominantly Muslim north of Nigeria against the World Health Organization, the United Nations Children's Fund and Nigeria's federal authorities. During the crisis that ensued, five northern states (Niger, Bauchi, Kano, Zamfara and Kaduna) banned the use of the controversial vaccine on children in their respective d…
Pentecostal Presidency? The Lagos-Ibadan ‘Theocratic Class’ & the Muslim ‘Other’
This paper analyses the politics of regime legitimacy through the instrumentality of religious discourse purveyed through a putative Christian ‘theocratic class’ surrounding the Obasanjo presidency in Nigeria. Though the emphasis is on Western Nigerian Christian discourse because of its undeniable influence in the polity since 1999, it incorporates Muslim and northern Nigerian religious discourse in so far as it is seen as constituting the signif…
The Muslim response to the Pentecostal surge in Nigeria
The paper postulates the emergence of a charismatic form of Islam in Western Nigeria, indexed by new modalities of prayer, modes of worship and proselytizing, organizational features, and repertoires of devotion that closely approximate forms and expressions normally exclusively associated with Pentecostal Christianity. It is argued that this new formation of Islam, while apparently triggered by Pentecostalism's recent success in a competitive re…
When corruption fights back
This essay analyses the construction of the anti-corruption war under the civilian government in Nigeria between 1999 and 2008. We consolidate existing insights in the literature in three key ways. First, we show that in democratising contexts like Nigeria, the gravest threats to anti-corruption campaigns often emanate from a combination of intra-elite rancour and political intrigue. Second, we provide an explanation of what happens when, literal…
Playing politics with the mobile phone in Nigeria
On 19 September 2003, mobile phone subscribers in Nigeria took the unprecedented step of switching off their handsets en masse. The subscribers took this symbolic step in protest against perceived exploitation by the existing mobile phone companies. Among other things, they were angered by allegedly exorbitant tariffs, poor reception, frequent and unfavourable changes in contract terms, and arbitrary reduction of credits. Among other critical que…
State of Travesty
What can humour accomplish when faced with unbending state power in a continent ravaged by the most horrendous fatalities? If comics cannot remove sit-tight despots, of what use are they? How does one manage to laugh in the roiling pool of kindred blood? These and other important dilemmas have framed scholarly debates on the efficacy of jokes as capacitors of social change. Using these dilemmas as an analytic pivot, the article ponders the utilit…
The abrogation of the electorate
This paper captures an emerging African phenomenon in which the form of democracy is brazenly used to invalidate its very substance. Drawing on particulars from Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria, we articulate the re-ascendance and re-invigoration of anti-democratic forces across Africa, and weigh up the challenge that violent erasure of the electoral sovereignty of citizens constitutes to democratic theory and practice
Sex, citizenship and the state in Nigeria
In this article, the author uses the belligerence toward alternative sexualities in Nigeria as a point of departure for a critical appraisal of the terms of inclusion and exclusion in the country's body politic. This belligerence has thrown up a rare alliance of the state, religious leaders and the print media. Attributing this alliance to the postcolonial crisis over the functions of masculinisation and power, the author suggests that anti-gay r…
In search of a public sphere
Many polities in transition are undermined by what is commonly called a ‘deliberation deficit’, which means the absence from a given social formation of a common ethos that frames the debate on issues of general concern. In a sense, this scenario can be revealing, for it often highlights some of the nagging issues haunting the process of nation-building itself. This arguably is the case in Nigeria where, in November 2002, violence in the northern…
Biomedical loopholes, distrusted state, and the politics of HIV/Aids 'cure' in Nigeria
As socio-medical phenomena, epidemics are revealing of the cultures in which they are experienced. The HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa exposes antecedent tensions between state and society, and, on a broader canvas, between the global north and south. As a contribution to the emerging literature on the social ramifications of HIV/AIDS, this article examines the saga of the Nigerian physician and immunologist, Dr Jeremiah Abalaka, who like other innov…
Transnational Resource Flow and the Paradoxes of Belonging
The rise in the volume of known global foreign worker remittances to countries of origin has sparked considerable academic and policy interest. Much attention has been paid to the assumed ‘development’ potential of these financial remittances, an approach which encapsulates the tendency to envisage the consequences of remittance flows in overwhelmingly economic terms. This article takes issue with such an approach, arguing for a refocusing of the…
The backlash against civil society in the wake of the Long War on Terror
The enthusiasm for civil society that emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the spread of democratic regimes has been replaced in recent years by a backlash against civil society on many levels and fronts. This has particularly intensified since the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the ensuing global war on terror. This article examines the causes of this backlash within the context of the 'Long War on Terro…
Religious NGOs, civil society and the quest for a public sphere in Nigeria
This article examines the changing role of religious organizations in the dynamics of the public sphere in Nigeria, and does so both in the light of the recognition of the growing importance of faith‐based organizations across the continent, and within the framework of the discourse on religion, civil society and the public sphere. It argues that this is indeed an unstable relationship, with religious forces simultaneously complementing and under…
Second thoughts on civil society
Is a vibrant associational life necessarily antecedent to a strong civil society? Does associationism produce a more democratic and egalitarian political order? Using data from Nigeria, this paper interrogates a major problematic in the conceptualization of civil society. The contemporary reanimation of the idea of civil society in African scholarship has privileged the role of voluntary associations. This paper challenges and critically complica…
Lamidi Adedibu ou l'état nigérian entre contraction et sous-traitance
Alors même que Chief Lamidi Ariyibi Adedibu a été un acteur central dans l'émergence d'un nouveau mode de gouvernance au Nigeria ces deux dernières décennies, sa carrière politique a été jusqu'à présent peu étudiée. On utilise ici l'analyse de la trajectoire personnelle et politique de Chief Adedibu comme point de départ d'une sociologie plus large de la vie politique dans le Nigeria d'aujourd'hui. En replaçant Adedibu dans le contexte complexe d…
The Alternative Genealogy of Civil Society and Its Implications for Africa
Despite its ubiquity in popular and academic discourses, consensus about the epistemological status of the idea of civil society remains elusive. In Africa, the literature is circumscribed by doubts about, first, its applicability; and second, the usefulness of civil society in explicating social processes on the continent. This has generated a conflictive, yet deeply illuminating, scholarship. The paper makes a modest contribution to the debate,…
Governance and the Crisis of Rule in Contemporary Africa
This volume advances the discussions of leadership in Africa's specific history, culture, economy, and politics. The book promotes an understanding of leadership and its paradoxes and illuminates the
Revalorizing the Political
Who needs civil society? What is civil society useful for? While the foregoing and similar dilemmas dominated the early civil society literature on sub-Saharan Africa, this was soon followed by a steady shift to the analysis of non-governmental organizations. The shift foreshadowed the recent methodological approach to civil society research which emphasizes ‘measuring’ and ‘surveying’ civil society. In this essay, I contend that this approach, t…
The Illusion of Civil Society
On the theologico-theatrical
Nigerian Pentecostalism continues to assume many of the externalities of popular culture in the country, creating a unique composite of spirituality and secular entertainment. In an emergent trend, church leaders invite popular entertainers into church services and other church-related events with the declared aim of energizing their congregations. Where does the imperative in Nigerian Pentecostalism to outsource the work of inspiration to perfor…
Introducing Nigeria at fifty
Nigeria, Africa's most populous democracy, celebrates her 50th year as an independent nation in October 2010. As the cliché states, ‘As Nigeria goes, so goes Africa’. This volume frames the socio-historical and political trajectory of Nigeria while examining the many dimensions of the critical choices that she has made as an independent nation. How does the social composition of interest and power illuminate the actualities and narratives of the …
White-collar fundamentalism
Home historically to a politically engaged youth sector, Nigeria has, over the past two decades, witnessed a growing incidence of religious extremism involving educated youth, especially within university campuses. For all its important ramifications, and despite the continued infusion of social and political activity in the country by religious impulse, this phenomenon has yet to receive a systematic or coherent treatment in the relevant literat…
Christianity, sexuality and citizenship in Africa
Citizenship in sub-Saharan Africa has undergone profound changes in recent decades as part of wider social and political dynamics. One notable development is the emergence of Christianity, especially in its Pentecostal-Charismatic forms, as a public religion. Christian actors, beliefs and practices have increasingly come to manifest themselves in the public sphere, actively engage with politics, define narratives of nationhood and shape notions o…
The Charismatic porn-star
Work on the sexual dimension of citizenship in Africa has privileged the way contemporary struggles over sexualities and sexual identities have opened up tensions over belonging and civic mattering. This article focuses on how political subjectivity is shaped and determined against the backdrop of the erotic economy between the pastor and his congregation. Mobilizing the idea of a Pentecostal erotic economy to evoke a debate around gender, patria…
Democratic Transition and Political Violence in Nigeria
Des temps coloniaux à nos jours, l'activité politique a toujours été accompagnée d'un certain niveau de violence au Nigeria. Les deux tentatives d'instauration de la démocratie civile durant la première et seconde républiques se sont soldées par un échec en raison de l'anarchie sociale. Une fois de plus, le pays est en plein à une convulsion sociale, en témoigne une avalanche d'attentats à la bombe et d'assassinats dans tout le pays. Le présent a…
In search of a public sphere
Many polities in transition are undermined by what is commonly called a ‘deliberation deficit’, which means the absence from a given social formation of a common ethos that frames the debate on issues of general concern. In a sense, this scenario can be revealing, for it often highlights some of the nagging issues haunting the process of nation-building itself. This arguably is the case in Nigeria where, in November 2002, violence in the northern…
Second thoughts on civil society
Is a vibrant associational life necessarily antecedent to a strong civil society? Does associationism produce a more democratic and egalitarian political order? Using data from Nigeria, this paper interrogates a major problematic in the conceptualization of civil society. The contemporary reanimation of the idea of civil society in African scholarship has privileged the role of voluntary associations. This paper challenges and critically complica…
The Alternative Genealogy of Civil Society and Its Implications for Africa
Despite its ubiquity in popular and academic discourses, consensus about the epistemological status of the idea of civil society remains elusive. In Africa, the literature is circumscribed by doubts about, first, its applicability; and second, the usefulness of civil society in explicating social processes on the continent. This has generated a conflictive, yet deeply illuminating, scholarship. The paper makes a modest contribution to the debate,…
A crisis of trust
In the middle of 2003, disagreement over the safety of the oral polio vaccine pitted ordinary citizens and community leaders in the predominantly Muslim north of Nigeria against the World Health Organization, the United Nations Children's Fund and Nigeria's federal authorities. During the crisis that ensued, five northern states (Niger, Bauchi, Kano, Zamfara and Kaduna) banned the use of the controversial vaccine on children in their respective d…
Pentecostal Presidency? The Lagos-Ibadan ‘Theocratic Class’ & the Muslim ‘Other’
This paper analyses the politics of regime legitimacy through the instrumentality of religious discourse purveyed through a putative Christian ‘theocratic class’ surrounding the Obasanjo presidency in Nigeria. Though the emphasis is on Western Nigerian Christian discourse because of its undeniable influence in the polity since 1999, it incorporates Muslim and northern Nigerian religious discourse in so far as it is seen as constituting the signif…
Playing politics with the mobile phone in Nigeria
On 19 September 2003, mobile phone subscribers in Nigeria took the unprecedented step of switching off their handsets en masse. The subscribers took this symbolic step in protest against perceived exploitation by the existing mobile phone companies. Among other things, they were angered by allegedly exorbitant tariffs, poor reception, frequent and unfavourable changes in contract terms, and arbitrary reduction of credits. Among other critical que…
Religious NGOs, civil society and the quest for a public sphere in Nigeria
This article examines the changing role of religious organizations in the dynamics of the public sphere in Nigeria, and does so both in the light of the recognition of the growing importance of faith‐based organizations across the continent, and within the framework of the discourse on religion, civil society and the public sphere. It argues that this is indeed an unstable relationship, with religious forces simultaneously complementing and under…
Lamidi Adedibu ou l'état nigérian entre contraction et sous-traitance
Alors même que Chief Lamidi Ariyibi Adedibu a été un acteur central dans l'émergence d'un nouveau mode de gouvernance au Nigeria ces deux dernières décennies, sa carrière politique a été jusqu'à présent peu étudiée. On utilise ici l'analyse de la trajectoire personnelle et politique de Chief Adedibu comme point de départ d'une sociologie plus large de la vie politique dans le Nigeria d'aujourd'hui. En replaçant Adedibu dans le contexte complexe d…
White-collar fundamentalism
Home historically to a politically engaged youth sector, Nigeria has, over the past two decades, witnessed a growing incidence of religious extremism involving educated youth, especially within university campuses. For all its important ramifications, and despite the continued infusion of social and political activity in the country by religious impulse, this phenomenon has yet to receive a systematic or coherent treatment in the relevant literat…
Transformation and Trouble
The backlash against civil society in the wake of the Long War on Terror
The enthusiasm for civil society that emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the spread of democratic regimes has been replaced in recent years by a backlash against civil society on many levels and fronts. This has particularly intensified since the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the ensuing global war on terror. This article examines the causes of this backlash within the context of the 'Long War on Terro…
Transnational Resource Flow and the Paradoxes of Belonging
The rise in the volume of known global foreign worker remittances to countries of origin has sparked considerable academic and policy interest. Much attention has been paid to the assumed ‘development’ potential of these financial remittances, an approach which encapsulates the tendency to envisage the consequences of remittance flows in overwhelmingly economic terms. This article takes issue with such an approach, arguing for a refocusing of the…
The Uses of Ridicule
As post-military 'democratic' regimes across Africa perpetuate norms and practices that were characteristic of the previous openly authoritarian era, humour and ridicule have emerged as a means through which ordinary people attempt to deconstruct and construct meaning out of a reality that is decidedly surreal. In Nigeria jokes serve a double function as a tool for subordinate classes to deride the state (including its agents) and themselves. Jok…
The Illusion of Civil Society
Civil Society Theory
The Visa God
This chapter emphasizes an equally important but so far largely undocumented dimension of religious transnationalism - the role that religion plays in transnational migration before actual migration. It analyzes an important slice of sociological reality in contemporary Nigeria, a country at the hub of the current wave of emigration of young people (highly skilled and otherwise) from sub- Saharan Africa. The chapter draws on secondary data from b…
Encountering the Nigerian State
Introduction
In his excellent introduction to the volume Civil Society, Public Sphere and Citizenship Dialogues and Perceptions, which he coedited with Helmut Reifeld, Rajeev Bhargava underlined the need to query what analytical purchase the state and other fundamental political and sociological concepts may have (for a non-Western society) by posing the following critical questions: How did they evolve in European societies? Does our [i.e., Indian] society f…
Community, Types of
State of Travesty
What can humour accomplish when faced with unbending state power in a continent ravaged by the most horrendous fatalities? If comics cannot remove sit-tight despots, of what use are they? How does one manage to laugh in the roiling pool of kindred blood? These and other important dilemmas have framed scholarly debates on the efficacy of jokes as capacitors of social change. Using these dilemmas as an analytic pivot, the article ponders the utilit…
Introducing Nigeria at fifty
Nigeria, Africa's most populous democracy, celebrates her 50th year as an independent nation in October 2010. As the cliché states, ‘As Nigeria goes, so goes Africa’. This volume frames the socio-historical and political trajectory of Nigeria while examining the many dimensions of the critical choices that she has made as an independent nation. How does the social composition of interest and power illuminate the actualities and narratives of the …
Revalorizing the Political
Who needs civil society? What is civil society useful for? While the foregoing and similar dilemmas dominated the early civil society literature on sub-Saharan Africa, this was soon followed by a steady shift to the analysis of non-governmental organizations. The shift foreshadowed the recent methodological approach to civil society research which emphasizes ‘measuring’ and ‘surveying’ civil society. In this essay, I contend that this approach, t…
The abrogation of the electorate
This paper captures an emerging African phenomenon in which the form of democracy is brazenly used to invalidate its very substance. Drawing on particulars from Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria, we articulate the re-ascendance and re-invigoration of anti-democratic forces across Africa, and weigh up the challenge that violent erasure of the electoral sovereignty of citizens constitutes to democratic theory and practice
Biomedical loopholes, distrusted state, and the politics of HIV/Aids 'cure' in Nigeria
As socio-medical phenomena, epidemics are revealing of the cultures in which they are experienced. The HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa exposes antecedent tensions between state and society, and, on a broader canvas, between the global north and south. As a contribution to the emerging literature on the social ramifications of HIV/AIDS, this article examines the saga of the Nigerian physician and immunologist, Dr Jeremiah Abalaka, who like other innov…
Political science (51 works) · Law (47 works) · Sociology (46 works) · Politics (41 works) · Law (22 works) · Political economy (21 works) · Religion, Society, and Development (16 works) · Civil society (15 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Democracy (14 works)