Graham Harrison
Biographic Data
| ID | 3629170 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Graham Harrison |
| GIVEN NAMES | Graham |
| FAMILY NAME | Harrison |
| SIGNATURE | HARRISON G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian National University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 53 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 159 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 52 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Developmentalism: The Normative and Transformative within Capitalism
When we talk about development, we are talking about capitalist development. Taking a historical-comparativ e approach, Harrison understands development as a transformation which involves a deep and integrated political economy of change: a shift from a state of ‘capital-ascendance’ to ‘capital-dominance’. It is only through a transformation towards capital dominance that mass poverty reduction and the construction of a commonwealth are possible.…
Political Identities and Social Struggle in Africa
This chapter analyses the concept of political identity within the context of the changing social space of the African city. It considers the location of identity within a broader framework of political and economic change and explores the rise of a kind of ‘identity politics’ in contemporary African cities by relating the political phenomenon of ethnicity to identity. The chapter examines identity politics in urban Africa. It understands identit…
Mozambique: Development, Inequality and the New Market Geography
This chapter investigates Mozambique's contemporary socio-economic situation by evaluating the developmental prospects of what is termed as Mozambique's new market geography. It was only after 1926 that the colonial project in Mozambique attempted seriously to forge a national economy, oriented towards the Portuguese metropole. Forced labour was widespread until 1961, and carried on in covert forms up until independence. After a period of instabi…
Rwanda and the Difficult Business of Capitalist Development
This article argues that current schisms in the research on post-genocide Rwanda are not sui generis but symptomatic of a broader set of separations within our understanding of development. Both the research on Rwanda and the most prominent intellectual responses to the rise of neoliberalism in development research have generated separations between a concern with rights and individual agency and structural transformation. The article sets out a …
Rwanda: An agrarian developmental state
This article investigates Rwanda’s agricultural policies and institutions as a historically contextualised response to exceptionally adverse developmental circumstances. Using the agrarian question as an analytical point of reference, the article argues that it is extremely difficult to identify how increases in productivity and income in smallholder agriculture can be achieved without forceful state action and a sustained injection of resources.…
New African development
This anniversary issue of the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) revisits the prospects for development in Africa. The theme is as prominent today as it was in 1974. However one discusses
The African presence: Representations of Africa in the construction of Britishness
Campaign Africa: Exploring the Representation of Africa and its Role in British Identity
This article explores the way that Africa has been represented within British political modernity through the representations of campaign organisations. Using a model of framing, campaigns are reviewed in terms of the ways that Africa is rendered diagnostically, prognostically and motivationally. In each case, one can identity a ‘layering’ within a single campaign tradition. This tradition is based in a Christian, liberal and humanitarian nationa…
Introduction: After Orthodoxy: Governance and Development in Africa
Poverty reduction and the chronically rich
Neoliberal Africa: The Impact Of Global Social Engineering
Neoliberalism has shaped African development for nearly thirty years. As such, it is not an economic 'shock' or a 'structural adjustment', but rather a historic shift in Africa's development politics and policy. This book explores the ways in which African countries have experienced the neoliberal project, highlighting how this project has gone beyond economic liberalisation and towards a bolder social transformation. As an ideology, neoliberalis…
Practices of Intervention: Repertoires, Habits, and Conduct in Neoliberal Africa
Neoliberalism evokes images of a global project of intervention and social engineering. However complex that neoliberal project might be, at its core resides a desire to organise societies according to the expectations generated by liberal or neoclassical market modelling. With a few exceptions, most research on neoliberalism emphasises its 'dirtiness': neoliberalism in practice has been complex, sometimes contradictory, halting in its progress, …
The World Bank and social transformation in international politics: Liberalism, governance, and sovereignty
The World Bank and social transformation in international politics: liberalism, governance, and sovereignty." Review of African Political Economy, 37(123), pp. 115–116
Demanding development
1. Ubuntu, notes David McDonald in his article, is 'Broadly defined as an "African worldview" that places communal interests above those of the individual, and where human existence is dependent upon interaction with others
It is (always) the political economy, stupid
In the midst of a continuing economic crisis, the centres of global capitalism remain preoccupied with much that is predictable, if somewhat depressingly familiar: economies in crisis; unsustainabl
Post-neoliberalism
Post-neoliberalism?Grand concepts like neoliberalism are both necessary and dangerous.Necessary because they help to identify the ways in which the global political economy is organised, how power works, and what ideas and ideologies are ascendant.Dangerous because these grand concepts enable generalisations, finesse specificities and tempt people to reckless degrees of certainty in their observations.Evocative of Nietzsche's understanding of tru…
Against One-dimensional Africa
World Bank President Robert Zoellick recently wrote in Uganda's main independent newspaper: The financial crisis has wounded Africa. But Africans' vision for the future has remained resilient: They
Global Crisis, African Governance and a Sense of Déjà vu
Africa's Future is up to Africans. Really
From the global to the local? Governance and development at the local level: Reflections from Tanzania
Governance reform practice has mostly focused on building up and transforming central state institutions. Furthermore, the politics of aid has often constructed a very 'introverted' politics based in large cities. This article explores the means through which governance ideas are implemented outside this 'governance realm', by looking at the ways in which the Lushoto District government in Tanzania has mediated a range of policy changes that have…
Privatising the State by Béatrice Hibou , Jonathan Derrick (review)
Book Reviews 267 Béatrice Hibou (ed.), Jonathan Derrick (trans.), Privatising the State (London: Hurst; New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 279. ISBN 0-231-13464-9. $37.00 (pbk). Against the trend of many edited books, this collection successfully argues a focused theoretical point across a range of country case studies. In essence, the authors do not represent processes of privatization in terms of their success or failure; nor do th…
Trading Africa's Future
flourished in the late eighteenth century, the British abolitionist movement used the transnational social relations generated by the slave trade to argue that peoples in different parts of the world shared a common moral space defined by the fact that the consumption of 'slave sugar' in London was an act of complicity in what one can reasonably call a global crime against humanity. Indeed, transnational capitalist trade relations have proven to …
Special section: Peasantries, globalisation and capitalism
Global Encounters: International Political Economy, Development and Globalization
How has globalization impacted on development? For Harrison, the answer lies in the international political economy, and the ways in which states have managed economic globalization - from positions o
The World Bank, Governance and Theories of Political Action in Africa
This article considers the World Bank as a political thinker. This involves an interpretation of the values, methodologies, and theoretical references contained within the Bank's governance documentation. Generally, the Bank steers away from a serious engagement with the nature of states, or the dynamics of reform execution, even in its more detailed policy documents in reform areas such as administrative reform. But, by looking at the World Bank…
Post-Conditionality Politics and Administrative Reform: Reflections on the Cases of Uganda and Tanzania
This article contributes to the discussion of the nature of external intervention in the reform processes of indebted states. Looking at administrative reform in Uganda and Tanzania, it is argued that external involvement in sub-Saharan Africa is becoming increasingly differentiated. For some states - including the two cases dealt with here - a key set of continuities and changes allows us to conceptualize a regime of post-conditionality. Post-co…
Economic faith, Social project and a misreading of African society: The travails of neoliberalism in Africa
This article is interested in the nature of the neoliberal project's expansion in Africa. The starting point for this exploration is a need to reflect on how the concept of neoliberalism is defined, especially the way it signals an economic doctrine which can only be realised as a broader sociopolitical project. The article goes on to show how, inasmuch as neoliberalism has consolidated itself in African states, it has done so by expanding its bo…
The World Bank, Governance and Theories of Political Action in Africa
This article considers the World Bank as a political thinker. This involves an interpretation of the values, methodologies, and theoretical references contained within the Bank's governance documentation. Generally, the Bank steers away from a serious engagement with the nature of states, or the dynamics of reform execution, even in its more detailed policy documents in reform areas such as administrative reform. But, by looking at the World Bank…
Africa, Imperialism & New Forms of Accumulation
The profound hypocrisy
Democracy in Mozambique: The significance of multi‐party elections
This article examines democracy as a process rather than an event, or some kind of transition from one regime to another via a period of exceptional change. In doing so, it reveals a set of often contradictory forces which seriously question the democratic content of social change in Mozambique since 1992. The key points which this article raises are: a particular model of democratisation has been, paradoxically, imposed on the masses by national…
Rwanda: An agrarian developmental state
This article investigates Rwanda’s agricultural policies and institutions as a historically contextualised response to exceptionally adverse developmental circumstances. Using the agrarian question as an analytical point of reference, the article argues that it is extremely difficult to identify how increases in productivity and income in smallholder agriculture can be achieved without forceful state action and a sustained injection of resources.…
Corruption as 'boundary politics: The state, democratisation, and Mozambique's unstable liberalisation
This article begins by looking at the historical development of corruption in Mozambique, associating it with the breakdown of the party-state and the civil war. Following from this historical context, attention is paid to contemporary forms of corruption and their relationship to broader economic changes. It is argued that structural adjustment has created an unstable political economy in which social boundaries are unclear and/or in flux. Becau…
Traditional Power and its Absence in Mecúfi, Mozambique
(2002). Traditional Power and its Absence in Mecufi, Mozambique. Journal of Contemporary African Studies: Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 107-130
Administering market friendly growth? Liberal populism and the World Bank's involvement in administrative reform in sub-Saharan Africa
This article critically analyses recent innovations in the World Bank's thinking on administrative reform as part of a broader set of notions contained within the international 'governance agenda'. It is argued that the Bank's administrative reform literature generates a discourse of liberal populism. Liberal populism keys in with i) a fundamental belief in the free market as a means towards development and stability, and ii) recent innovations t…
Marketing legitimacy in rural Mozambique: The case of Mecúfi district, northern Mozambique
There is a voluminous academic literature concerned with understanding the way in which African states act in rural societies. This article makes a contribution to this broad area of literature by looking at the way in which the state in Mozambique has intervened in, conditioned, or created trade between peasant farmers and other social agents. The contours of this interaction are complex, reflecting specific class relations, particular socio-cul…
Post-neoliberalism
Post-neoliberalism?Grand concepts like neoliberalism are both necessary and dangerous.Necessary because they help to identify the ways in which the global political economy is organised, how power works, and what ideas and ideologies are ascendant.Dangerous because these grand concepts enable generalisations, finesse specificities and tempt people to reckless degrees of certainty in their observations.Evocative of Nietzsche's understanding of tru…
New African development
This anniversary issue of the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) revisits the prospects for development in Africa. The theme is as prominent today as it was in 1974. However one discusses
Practices of Intervention: Repertoires, Habits, and Conduct in Neoliberal Africa
Neoliberalism evokes images of a global project of intervention and social engineering. However complex that neoliberal project might be, at its core resides a desire to organise societies according to the expectations generated by liberal or neoclassical market modelling. With a few exceptions, most research on neoliberalism emphasises its 'dirtiness': neoliberalism in practice has been complex, sometimes contradictory, halting in its progress, …
Clean‐ups, conditionality & adjustment: Why institutions matter in Mozambique
This article critically evaluates the nature of administrative reform in the context of conditionality and structural adjustment. Structural adjustment programmes constitute the broader environment and prioritisations within which donors and creditors support institutional reform. This raises the questions concerning the ownership and purpose of reform, especially if one bears in mind the substantial inequality of power between individual severel…
The African presence: Representations of Africa in the construction of Britishness
Campaign Africa: Exploring the Representation of Africa and its Role in British Identity
This article explores the way that Africa has been represented within British political modernity through the representations of campaign organisations. Using a model of framing, campaigns are reviewed in terms of the ways that Africa is rendered diagnostically, prognostically and motivationally. In each case, one can identity a ‘layering’ within a single campaign tradition. This tradition is based in a Christian, liberal and humanitarian nationa…
Poverty reduction and the chronically rich
Bringing political struggle back in: African politics, power & resistance
This article will investigate the enduring importance of political struggle as a key notion in the understanding of contemporary African politics. It does so with an awareness that this notion has fallen out of academic favour. This article sketches an approach that gives a key role to political struggle in processes of political change in sub‐Saharan Africa. In doing so, African political economies are seen as necessarily contested and therefore…
Corruption, development theory and the boundaries of social change
1999). Corruption, development theory and the boundaries of social change. Contemporary Politics: Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 207-220
Mozambique: An unsustainable democracy
This debate aims to assess the possibilities of democracy succeeding in Mozambique, that is, reproducing itself within Mozambican society in a sustainable manner through processes rooted in the social formations of Mozambique. This involves two principal considerations: first, the political and economic context in which democratisation is operating; second, the processes and institutions which are evolving within Mozambique to support and sustain…
From the global to the local? Governance and development at the local level: Reflections from Tanzania
Governance reform practice has mostly focused on building up and transforming central state institutions. Furthermore, the politics of aid has often constructed a very 'introverted' politics based in large cities. This article explores the means through which governance ideas are implemented outside this 'governance realm', by looking at the ways in which the Lushoto District government in Tanzania has mediated a range of policy changes that have…
Mozambique between two elections: A political economy of transition
1999). Mozambique between two elections: A political economy of transition. Democratization: Vol. 6, No. 4, pp. 166-180
The Adaptation of the Political System in the Development Process under Limited Suffrage: The Case of Western Samoa
The World Bank and social transformation in international politics: Liberalism, governance, and sovereignty
The World Bank and social transformation in international politics: liberalism, governance, and sovereignty." Review of African Political Economy, 37(123), pp. 115–116
Against One-dimensional Africa
World Bank President Robert Zoellick recently wrote in Uganda's main independent newspaper: The financial crisis has wounded Africa. But Africans' vision for the future has remained resilient: They
The Adaptation of the Political System in the Development Process under Limited Suffrage: The Case of Western Samoa
What's in an ethnic name: Soccer Clubs in Australia
On the absence of implicit sex-preference in Ghana
As part of a comparative analysis of uterine sibling groups to discover any evidence of ‘stopping rules’ related to actual preferences for children of one sex or another, the distribution of sequences of births by sex from a Ghanaian sample of 9392 mothers has been examined. No such rules can be detected.
Mozambique: An unsustainable democracy
This debate aims to assess the possibilities of democracy succeeding in Mozambique, that is, reproducing itself within Mozambican society in a sustainable manner through processes rooted in the social formations of Mozambique. This involves two principal considerations: first, the political and economic context in which democratisation is operating; second, the processes and institutions which are evolving within Mozambique to support and sustain…
Elections in Mozambique
Between 27 and 29 of October 1994, approximately 90 per cent of the 6.4m Mozambicans on the electoral register turned out to vote (The Independent, 31 October) in the presence of 2,200 international observers (The Guardian, 27 October). As in Angola and South Africa, the great efforts and calm conduct of ordinary people to vote proves that facile notions of democracy being inappropriate or premature for Africa are misplaced. Also similar to Angol…
Democracy in Mozambique: The significance of multi‐party elections
This article examines democracy as a process rather than an event, or some kind of transition from one regime to another via a period of exceptional change. In doing so, it reveals a set of often contradictory forces which seriously question the democratic content of social change in Mozambique since 1992. The key points which this article raises are: a particular model of democratisation has been, paradoxically, imposed on the masses by national…
Quantos somos?The second national population census of Mozambique
Between 1 and 15 of August [1997], Mozambique had its second country-wide population census. This briefing will outline how the census ran--an operation of considerable scale in an extremely poor and war-damaged country--and will also raise some broader questions which relate the census to Mozambique's contemporary politics
Marketing legitimacy in rural Mozambique: The case of Mecúfi district, northern Mozambique
There is a voluminous academic literature concerned with understanding the way in which African states act in rural societies. This article makes a contribution to this broad area of literature by looking at the way in which the state in Mozambique has intervened in, conditioned, or created trade between peasant farmers and other social agents. The contours of this interaction are complex, reflecting specific class relations, particular socio-cul…
Conflict resolution in a ‘non-conflict situation’: Tension & reconciliation in Mecúfi, Northern Mozambique
The unequivocal end to war in Mozambique in 1992 is a great achievement, however one analyses it (Armon et. al, 1998; FEF, 1995; Alden, 1997). There has been debate about the extent to which peace was a result of imperialist (and sub-imperialist) desires for de-escalation (Nilsson, 1993), or a result of Renamo's incorporation into the polity essentially through payments of money (Vines, 1993), but it remains the fact that the massive popular desi…
In memoriam Stephen Riley 1949–1999
Clean‐ups, conditionality & adjustment: Why institutions matter in Mozambique
This article critically evaluates the nature of administrative reform in the context of conditionality and structural adjustment. Structural adjustment programmes constitute the broader environment and prioritisations within which donors and creditors support institutional reform. This raises the questions concerning the ownership and purpose of reform, especially if one bears in mind the substantial inequality of power between individual severel…
Corruption as 'boundary politics: The state, democratisation, and Mozambique's unstable liberalisation
This article begins by looking at the historical development of corruption in Mozambique, associating it with the breakdown of the party-state and the civil war. Following from this historical context, attention is paid to contemporary forms of corruption and their relationship to broader economic changes. It is argued that structural adjustment has created an unstable political economy in which social boundaries are unclear and/or in flux. Becau…
Mozambique between two elections: A political economy of transition
1999). Mozambique between two elections: A political economy of transition. Democratization: Vol. 6, No. 4, pp. 166-180
Corruption, development theory and the boundaries of social change
1999). Corruption, development theory and the boundaries of social change. Contemporary Politics: Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 207-220
Administering market friendly growth? Liberal populism and the World Bank's involvement in administrative reform in sub-Saharan Africa
This article critically analyses recent innovations in the World Bank's thinking on administrative reform as part of a broader set of notions contained within the international 'governance agenda'. It is argued that the Bank's administrative reform literature generates a discourse of liberal populism. Liberal populism keys in with i) a fundamental belief in the free market as a means towards development and stability, and ii) recent innovations t…
Bringing political struggle back in: African politics, power & resistance
This article will investigate the enduring importance of political struggle as a key notion in the understanding of contemporary African politics. It does so with an awareness that this notion has fallen out of academic favour. This article sketches an approach that gives a key role to political struggle in processes of political change in sub‐Saharan Africa. In doing so, African political economies are seen as necessarily contested and therefore…
Post-Conditionality Politics and Administrative Reform: Reflections on the Cases of Uganda and Tanzania
This article contributes to the discussion of the nature of external intervention in the reform processes of indebted states. Looking at administrative reform in Uganda and Tanzania, it is argued that external involvement in sub-Saharan Africa is becoming increasingly differentiated. For some states - including the two cases dealt with here - a key set of continuities and changes allows us to conceptualize a regime of post-conditionality. Post-co…
Issues in the Contemporary Politics of Sub-Saharan Africa
Graham Harrison investigates contemporary African politics by privileging the dynamics of political struggle and resistance. Through the analysis of peasant politics, debt and structural adjustment, d
Political Struggle as History
This chapter will take three case studies in order to illustrate how it is vital to integrate the dynamics of struggle and liberation into modern historiographies of Africa. Each country’s modern history can be written sketchily by highlighting the most prominent political events (regime changes, or war and peace), but it is also the case that these apparently ‘top-down’ or macropolitical changes often involve — and are shaped by — struggles by c…
Defending the Ideal of Struggle
Chapter 1 set out a fairly open conceptualization of political struggle, based on considerations of equality and participation and with an awareness of the powerful shaping forces of historical capitalism. Having reviewed a number of themes and issues of contemporary African politics, one gets a sense of how contested structures of domination are. Peasants subvert or ignore the regulations of states and market their goods in semi- or non-licit wa…
Traditional Power and its Absence in Mecúfi, Mozambique
(2002). Traditional Power and its Absence in Mecufi, Mozambique. Journal of Contemporary African Studies: Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 107-130
Issues in the Contemporary Politics of Sub-Saharan Africa: The Dynamics of Struggle and Resistance
Africa, Imperialism & New Forms of Accumulation
The profound hypocrisy
Africa: Imperialism Goes Naked
The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, moving from its home, where it assumes respectable form, to the colonies, where it goes naked (Karl Marx, "The Future Results of British Rule in India," New York Daily Tribune, January 22, 1853).This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of t…
The World Bank and Africa
Shortlisted for the Inaugural International Political Economy Group annual book prize, 2006.An incisive exploration of the interventions of the World Bank in severely indebted African states. Understanding sovereignty as a frontier rather than a boundary, this key study develops a vision of a powerful international organization reconciling a global political economy with its own designs and a specific set of challenges posed by the African region…
Political science (49 works) · Law (39 works) · Political economy (39 works) · Sociology (37 works) · Economics (34 works) · Politics (34 works) · Law (28 works) · International Development and Aid (21 works) · Development economics (17 works) · Economic system (11 works)