Gail Harrison
Biographic Data
| ID | 91884 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gail Harrison |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gail |
| FAMILY NAME | Harrison |
| SIGNATURE | HARRISON G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sheffield |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4163-1338 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 66 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 201 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 66 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
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…
Authoritarian neoliberalism and capitalist transformation in Africa: All pain, no gain
As a region of the world capitalist political economy, Africa has been the epitome of neoliberalism as a universal project to remake societies in its image. In Africa, the neoliberal project encountered a region already ensconced in state-forms that were authoritarian, albeit very often weaker than their analogues in Latin America or Southern Europe. In these circumstances, neoliberalism both reconstructed and relied upon authoritarian state prac…
Post-wristband blues: The mixed fortunes of UK development campaigning under austerity and the Conservatives
This article explores the construction of an international development campaign coalition in difficult circumstances. The Enough Food If campaign ‘which involved over 200 NGOs’ was the first campaign coalition since the highly prominent Make Poverty History. But the circumstances within which the campaign took place were considerably changed. Furthermore, the internal dynamics of coalition building were complex and hardly auspicious. The article …
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 …
Onwards and Sidewards? The Curious Case of the Responsibility to Protect and Mass Violence in Africa
This article approaches Responsibility to Protect (R2P) from the ground up. Selecting African cases of mass atrocity in the age of R2P, it identifies key general features of contemporary violence. The article goes on to consider the nature and extent of R2P practice in each case. The argument is that R2P engagements in these conflicts display a mixture of weakness and irrelevance. The result of this is that R2P has failed significantly to reduce …
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.…
Between Agency and Liberation: The Slippery Subject of Resistance
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…
Peanut consumption and cardiovascular risk
Objective We evaluated the effects of peanut consumption on lipid profiles, atherogenic index of plasma (AIP) and CHD risk in hypercholesterolaemic men. Design Randomised crossover clinical trial. Setting Participants were randomly assigned to two groups. They were asked to consume peanut supplements (about 77 g) with their habitual diet for 4 weeks. Subjects Fifty-four hypercholesterolaemic men with total cholesterol (TC) concentrations between …
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…
The Africanization of poverty: A retrospective on 'Make poverty history
This article explores the ways in which the British campaign coalition Make Poverty History represented Africa throughout 2005. Focusing particularly on the G8 Gleneagles summit, Make Poverty History (MPH) asserted a series of justice claims which had no geographical reference. Nevertheless, as a result of internal tensions within the coalition, and especially as a result of the ways in which MPH interacted with other political agencies as the su…
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…
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…
Authoritarian neoliberalism and capitalist transformation in Africa: All pain, no gain
As a region of the world capitalist political economy, Africa has been the epitome of neoliberalism as a universal project to remake societies in its image. In Africa, the neoliberal project encountered a region already ensconced in state-forms that were authoritarian, albeit very often weaker than their analogues in Latin America or Southern Europe. In these circumstances, neoliberalism both reconstructed and relied upon authoritarian state prac…
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.…
The Africanization of poverty: A retrospective on 'Make poverty history
This article explores the ways in which the British campaign coalition Make Poverty History represented Africa throughout 2005. Focusing particularly on the G8 Gleneagles summit, Make Poverty History (MPH) asserted a series of justice claims which had no geographical reference. Nevertheless, as a result of internal tensions within the coalition, and especially as a result of the ways in which MPH interacted with other political agencies as the su…
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…
Acute respiratory illnesses in children under five years in Indramayu, West Java, Indonesia: A rapid ethnographic assessment
A rapid, focused ethnographic study was carried out in a rural area of West Java, Indonesia to identify local beliefs, perceptions, and practices surrounding acute respiratory infections (ARI) in infants and young children. The study incorporates key informant interviews, open-ended interviews, and structured data collection from fifty mothers of young children selected to represent the geographical settlement pattern in the area: structured inte…
Debt, Development and Intervention in Africa: The Contours of a Sovereign Frontier
This paper argues that the concept of the sovereign frontier can help us think about sovereignty and intervention in a way that moves beyond some of the limitations usually associated with the former concept. Focused on a zone of practice, embedded in a broader ‘movement’ of Western expansion, the sovereign frontier highlights political practices of subordination and incorporation that characterize the sway of intervention in contemporary African…
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…
Onwards and Sidewards? The Curious Case of the Responsibility to Protect and Mass Violence in Africa
This article approaches Responsibility to Protect (R2P) from the ground up. Selecting African cases of mass atrocity in the age of R2P, it identifies key general features of contemporary violence. The article goes on to consider the nature and extent of R2P practice in each case. The argument is that R2P engagements in these conflicts display a mixture of weakness and irrelevance. The result of this is that R2P has failed significantly to reduce …
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…
The Adaptation of the Political System in the Development Process under Limited Suffrage: The Case of Western Samoa
Ex Libris 6: Constructivism and Futurism: Russian and Other. Catalogue
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.
Implicit sex preferences: A comparative study
This paper extends the analysis of sibling groups from Ghana (Goody et al. , 1981) by a comparison with seven sets of data from various parts of the world. Sex preference is analysed from the actual holdings of children, taking into account the numbers and sequence of sexes by which the family is built up. The hypothesis examined is that sex preferences are related to general socioeconomic factors and in particular to differences between extensiv…
Joseph Sydney Weiner (1915–1982)
Acute respiratory illnesses in children under five years in Indramayu, West Java, Indonesia: A rapid ethnographic assessment
A rapid, focused ethnographic study was carried out in a rural area of West Java, Indonesia to identify local beliefs, perceptions, and practices surrounding acute respiratory infections (ARI) in infants and young children. The study incorporates key informant interviews, open-ended interviews, and structured data collection from fifty mothers of young children selected to represent the geographical settlement pattern in the area: structured inte…
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…
Assessing the Validity of Informant Recall: Results of a Time Use Pilot Study in Peri-Urban Egypt
This article presents the results of a time use pilot study comparing informant recall with direct observation in a peri-urban Egyptian village. The operations research was conducted to determine whether informant recall could substitute for direct observation as a method to elicit accurate information on individuals' daily patterns of time allocation in this village. Trained fieldworkers, using two structured protocols (one for informant recall …
Diet, Demography and Disease: Changing Perspectives on Anemia . Patricia Stuart‐Macadam and Susan Kent , eds
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
Peasants, the agrarian question and lenses of development
This paper reviews the interactions between conceptualizations of rural development and development theory more broadly. It identifies two key issues: the representation of peasant farmers and the agrarian question, that is, how do peasant societies interact with broader political economies? The paper develops two responses to these issues: first, that theory should not be imposed upon peasant societies to the neglect of ‘bottom up’ research; and…
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 science (55 works) · Law (47 works) · Sociology (46 works) · Political economy (43 works) · Economics (38 works) · Politics (37 works) · Law (34 works) · International Development and Aid (23 works) · Development economics (17 works) · Economic system (12 works)