Ambreena Manji
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 90334 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Ambreena Manji |
| PRENOMES | Ambreena |
| SOBRENOME | Manji |
| ASSINATURA | MANJI A |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Cardiff University |
| VERIFICADO | Não |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 35 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 153 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 35 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1998 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2022 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
Rereading Burying SM as a 'Social Reproduction Text
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Land rights and the rule of law
Recent years have seen a proliferation of land laws in Kenya, but these efforts have failed to confront the material consequence of unequal access to land. The legal focus has been on the redistribution of bureaucratic power and institutional change. This can be explained by the dominance of a rule-of-law approach that relies on technocratic solutions to land problems, and which obscures more difficult questions of how to address growing inequali…
Brenna Bhandar
Africa Needs Many Lawyers Trained for the Need of their Peoples’
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the setting up of university law schools in many African nations led to often bitter battles over the purpose of legal education. The stakes in these struggles were high. Deliberately neglected under colonial rule, legal education was an important focus for the leaders of new states, including Kwame Nkrumah, first President of Ghana. It was also a significant focus for expatriate British scholars and American fo…
Parliamentary Scrutiny of Aid Spending
This article argues that the UK is now facing an increasingly complex aid landscape and that this poses significant problems for parliamentary scrutiny. It explores one of the most important of the Official Development Assistance (ODA) innovations of recent years, the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF). The fund constitutes a significant investment of ODA money in research. The GCRF provides an important case study of changing aid spending. T…
Land law reform in Kenya
Much of the promise of the good governance agenda in African countries since the 1990s rested on reforms aimed at ‘getting the institutions right’, sometimes by creating regulatory agencies that would be above the fray of partisan politics. Such ‘institutional fix’ strategies are often frustrated because the new institutions themselves are embedded in existing state structures and power relations. The article argues that implementing Kenya’s land…
Roundtable review
Round table of responses to Prof Grace A. Musila's book A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour: Kenya, Britain and the Julie Ward murder
Wench Tactics? Openings in Conditions of Closure
Picking up the question of what FLaK might be, this editorial considers the relationship between openness and closure in feminist legal studies. How do we draw on feminist struggles for openness in common resources, from security to knowledge, as we inhabit a compromised space in commercial publishing? We think about this first in relation to the content of this issue: on image-based abuse continuums, asylum struggles, trials of protestors, custo…
The Limits of Socio-Legal Radicalism
In this review to mark the 25th anniversary of Social and Legal Studies ( SLS), we offer an assessment of the evolution of socio-legal scholarship on the Third World. We seek to locate the journal in the broader history of socio-legal studies and legal education in the United Kingdom and to consider its engagement with the work of Third World scholars. In order to do this, we recall the founding commitment of the journal’s first editorial board t…
Property, conservation, and enclosure in Karura forest, Nairobi
This article tells the story of the urban Karura forest in Nairobi in order to explore access to and control of green spaces in an African city at a time of rapid, haphazard urbanization. Using insights from critical legal geography, it shows that although in strictly legal terms Karura forest remains properly gazetted public land, it continues to exclude citizens in important ways. This is because of a neoliberal conception of security that has …
The International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Act 2015
With the enactment of the International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Act 2015, the United Kingdom has enshrined an aid target in law. It is now under a legal duty to spend 0.7% of Gross National Income (GNI) each year on aid. This article assesses the implications of enshrining a spending target for development assistance in law. It argues that commentators have focused their analyses too narrowly on the legal target and t…
Intimacy and Inequality
Patrick McAuslan
Bulldozers, homes and highways
In Kenya road building, widely viewed as an ‘unqualified human good’, is closely linked to an ‘Africa Rising’ narrative. In this paper the author argues that road building is an attempt to assert political authority derived from a longstanding developmentalist impulse, one in which private accumulation and spectacular public works go hand in hand. In light of massive infrastructural transformations, the author develops a conceptualisation of the …
Restoring Leviathan? The Kenyan Supreme Court, constitutional transformation, and the presidential election of 2013
This paper analyzes the Kenya Supreme Court's ruling in Odinga v IEBC, a petition challenging the declared outcome of the 2013 presidential election. The case was immediately significant given the hope that recourse to the courts would help to avoid widespread civil unrest which had followed the disputed presidential election of 2007. It was also a crucial test for the new dispensation established under the 2010 Constitution widely held to have b…
Land Law Reform in Eastern Africa
The Politics of Land Reform in Kenya 2012
This article provides a critique of the final stages of Kenya's land law reform process, which has resulted in the approval of the 2012 Land Act, Land Registration Act, and National Land Commission Act. It argues that in spite of the constitutional and political importance of the new legislation, the process was marked by haste, lack of engagement by legislators, and little participation by citizens. The new laws can be viewed as a deeply disappo…
Satire and the Politics of Corruption in Kenya
Corruption in Kenya has been a matter of intense concern for foreign donors and the international financial institutions. External efforts to change the ‘governance culture’ in this regard are not simply instrumental, composed of material restrictions and incentives. They are also inherently rhetorical, seeking to establish the plausibility of a set of values rooted in political economy. This paper examines two widely reported speeches of a forme…
The grabbed state
In 2002, Kenya's new National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) undertook to investigate and ensure the recovery of all public lands illegally allocated by the outgoing government. A Commission of Inquiry into the Illegal and Irregular Allocation of Public Land, chaired by the lawyer Paul Ndung'u, was appointed. The commission's report sets out the illegal land awards made to powerful individuals and families, provides important information about the mech…
Women's Land Rights and Privatisation in Eastern Africa – Edited by Birgit Englert and Elizabeth Daley
Eliminating Poverty? ‘Financial Inclusion’, Access to Land, and Gender Equality in International Development
The UK White Paper on International Development published in 2009 explicitly links access to financial services with poverty reduction. In doing so, it echoes the policies the World Bank set out in its 2008 Policy Research Report on Finance. This paper offers a detailed analysis of these development policies and connects the current plans for the expansion of financial sectors in the developing world with policies that promote the acquisition of …
Legal paradigms in contemporary land reform
This article examines the extent to which contemporary land reform debates are based on assumptions about ‘legal centralism’ – an implicit insistence that the label ‘law’ should be confined to state law, and that other normative orderings are, and should be, subordinate to the state. The current orthodoxy is, in other words, premised upon a model of historical progression that leaves little room for local variation: it is assumed that as societie…
The Politics of Land Reform in Africa
Law, labour and resistance to French colonialism in Sembene Ousmane's Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu
This article is concerned with the portrayal of law in colonial conflict in the work of Senegalese author Sembene Ousmane, focussing in particular on the novel Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu. There Ousmane dramutises an actual strike of railway workers in 1947 in order to mount a prophetic critique of post-independence Senegal. In convening a tribunal to try strike-breakers, the workers demonstrate the constitutive, law-creating power which, Ousmane i…
Cause and consequence in law and development
Patrick McAuslan, Bringing the Law Back In: essays in land, law and development (Aldershot: Ashgate. 2003)The title of the book sums up my overall stance: there is an important role for law in development generally and in land reform in particular and it is, in my view, wholly beneficial that after almost three decades of virtually ignoring the role of law in development ... international financial institutions, aid agencies and scholars in the W…
The Politics of Land Reform in Kenya 2012
This article provides a critique of the final stages of Kenya's land law reform process, which has resulted in the approval of the 2012 Land Act, Land Registration Act, and National Land Commission Act. It argues that in spite of the constitutional and political importance of the new legislation, the process was marked by haste, lack of engagement by legislators, and little participation by citizens. The new laws can be viewed as a deeply disappo…
Land law reform in Kenya
Much of the promise of the good governance agenda in African countries since the 1990s rested on reforms aimed at ‘getting the institutions right’, sometimes by creating regulatory agencies that would be above the fray of partisan politics. Such ‘institutional fix’ strategies are often frustrated because the new institutions themselves are embedded in existing state structures and power relations. The article argues that implementing Kenya’s land…
Bulldozers, homes and highways
In Kenya road building, widely viewed as an ‘unqualified human good’, is closely linked to an ‘Africa Rising’ narrative. In this paper the author argues that road building is an attempt to assert political authority derived from a longstanding developmentalist impulse, one in which private accumulation and spectacular public works go hand in hand. In light of massive infrastructural transformations, the author develops a conceptualisation of the …
The grabbed state
In 2002, Kenya's new National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) undertook to investigate and ensure the recovery of all public lands illegally allocated by the outgoing government. A Commission of Inquiry into the Illegal and Irregular Allocation of Public Land, chaired by the lawyer Paul Ndung'u, was appointed. The commission's report sets out the illegal land awards made to powerful individuals and families, provides important information about the mech…
Gender and the politics of the land reform process in Tanzania
In 1998, over seven years after a Commission of Inquiry into Land Matters was appointed by the then president of Tanzania, Ali Hassan Mwinyi, in January 1991, it is expected that a Land Bill will be tabled in the Tanzanian National Assembly. These seven years have witnessed mounting debate on the purpose and direction of land tenure reform. The purpose of this article is to review the debate in order to show that the question of women's unequal r…
Imagining Women's 'Legal World
This article argues that most feminist legal theory has been located within a dominant and phallocentric legal centralist paradigm and that this has hindered feminism's engagement with legal pluralism. I will argue that theoretical work which privileges state law can at best furnish us with only partial accounts of women's experiences of law. Articulating a feminine view of the (legal) world requires an engagement with legal pluralism
Restoring Leviathan? The Kenyan Supreme Court, constitutional transformation, and the presidential election of 2013
This paper analyzes the Kenya Supreme Court's ruling in Odinga v IEBC, a petition challenging the declared outcome of the 2013 presidential election. The case was immediately significant given the hope that recourse to the courts would help to avoid widespread civil unrest which had followed the disputed presidential election of 2007. It was also a crucial test for the new dispensation established under the 2010 Constitution widely held to have b…
Eliminating Poverty? ‘Financial Inclusion’, Access to Land, and Gender Equality in International Development
The UK White Paper on International Development published in 2009 explicitly links access to financial services with poverty reduction. In doing so, it echoes the policies the World Bank set out in its 2008 Policy Research Report on Finance. This paper offers a detailed analysis of these development policies and connects the current plans for the expansion of financial sectors in the developing world with policies that promote the acquisition of …
Her Name Is Kamundage
This article introduces three models by which it is possible to interpret women's relations to property: the structuralist model, the interactionist model and the entitlement model. By reference to fleldwork carried out in the Kagera region of Tanzania, it discusses the potential of each model to deepen our understanding of women's relations to land and argues that none of the models taken alone is adequate fully to explain the range of ways in w…
Parliamentary Scrutiny of Aid Spending
This article argues that the UK is now facing an increasingly complex aid landscape and that this poses significant problems for parliamentary scrutiny. It explores one of the most important of the Official Development Assistance (ODA) innovations of recent years, the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF). The fund constitutes a significant investment of ODA money in research. The GCRF provides an important case study of changing aid spending. T…
Land reform in the shadow of the state
Note: this is an edited and abridged version of a longer paper of the same name which was published recently in Third World Quarterly, Vol.22, No.3, (June) 2001, pp.327-42. Oxfam GB is extremely grateful to the publishers of Third World Quarterly for granting permission to post Ambreena Manji’s article on this website so soon after its publication
Remortgaging Women's Lives
Satire and the Politics of Corruption in Kenya
Corruption in Kenya has been a matter of intense concern for foreign donors and the international financial institutions. External efforts to change the ‘governance culture’ in this regard are not simply instrumental, composed of material restrictions and incentives. They are also inherently rhetorical, seeking to establish the plausibility of a set of values rooted in political economy. This paper examines two widely reported speeches of a forme…
Capital, labour and land relations in Africa
This paper presents a gender analysis of the World Bank's recent Policy Research Report. It assesses the implications for women, and more widely for gender relations, of the World Bank's approach to land relations. The analysis focuses on two issues: the Report's promotion of formal rural credit and its assumption of the availability of women's agricultural labour. This paper challenges the notion of 'non-contractible labour', as well as the Repo…
Africa Needs Many Lawyers Trained for the Need of their Peoples’
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the setting up of university law schools in many African nations led to often bitter battles over the purpose of legal education. The stakes in these struggles were high. Deliberately neglected under colonial rule, legal education was an important focus for the leaders of new states, including Kwame Nkrumah, first President of Ghana. It was also a significant focus for expatriate British scholars and American fo…
The Limits of Socio-Legal Radicalism
In this review to mark the 25th anniversary of Social and Legal Studies ( SLS), we offer an assessment of the evolution of socio-legal scholarship on the Third World. We seek to locate the journal in the broader history of socio-legal studies and legal education in the United Kingdom and to consider its engagement with the work of Third World scholars. In order to do this, we recall the founding commitment of the journal’s first editorial board t…
The emergence of African law as an academic discipline in Britain
This article examines the role of British legal scholars and institutions in the development of African law in the period from the end of the Second World War to the 1960s. In particular, it considers the extent to which the new legal scholars broke with the methods and priorities of anthropologists who had studied and developed African law in the colonial period. In editing journals and law reports, as well as founding law faculties, these schol…
Commodifying Land, Fetishising Law
(2003). Commodifying Land, Fetishising Law: Women’s Struggles to Claim Land Rights in Uganda. Australian Feminist Law Journal: Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 81-92
Wench Tactics? Openings in Conditions of Closure
Picking up the question of what FLaK might be, this editorial considers the relationship between openness and closure in feminist legal studies. How do we draw on feminist struggles for openness in common resources, from security to knowledge, as we inhabit a compromised space in commercial publishing? We think about this first in relation to the content of this issue: on image-based abuse continuums, asylum struggles, trials of protestors, custo…
The International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Act 2015
With the enactment of the International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Act 2015, the United Kingdom has enshrined an aid target in law. It is now under a legal duty to spend 0.7% of Gross National Income (GNI) each year on aid. This article assesses the implications of enshrining a spending target for development assistance in law. It argues that commentators have focused their analyses too narrowly on the legal target and t…
Intimacy and Inequality
Law, labour and resistance to French colonialism in Sembene Ousmane's Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu
This article is concerned with the portrayal of law in colonial conflict in the work of Senegalese author Sembene Ousmane, focussing in particular on the novel Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu. There Ousmane dramutises an actual strike of railway workers in 1947 in order to mount a prophetic critique of post-independence Senegal. In convening a tribunal to try strike-breakers, the workers demonstrate the constitutive, law-creating power which, Ousmane i…
Cause and consequence in law and development
Patrick McAuslan, Bringing the Law Back In: essays in land, law and development (Aldershot: Ashgate. 2003)The title of the book sums up my overall stance: there is an important role for law in development generally and in land reform in particular and it is, in my view, wholly beneficial that after almost three decades of virtually ignoring the role of law in development ... international financial institutions, aid agencies and scholars in the W…
Mind with Mind and Spirit with Spirit’
Lord Denning played an important role in the establishment and development of legal education and lawyers' training in Africa from the late 1950s onwards. By exploring this involvement it is possible to add to existing work on Denning's vision of the role of law and legal professionalism. In post‐colonial Africa, order and stability were best assured by a cadre of lawyers imbued with the virtues characteristic of English practitioners over the ce…
Gender and the politics of the land reform process in Tanzania
In 1998, over seven years after a Commission of Inquiry into Land Matters was appointed by the then president of Tanzania, Ali Hassan Mwinyi, in January 1991, it is expected that a Land Bill will be tabled in the Tanzanian National Assembly. These seven years have witnessed mounting debate on the purpose and direction of land tenure reform. The purpose of this article is to review the debate in order to show that the question of women's unequal r…
Imagining Women's 'Legal World
This article argues that most feminist legal theory has been located within a dominant and phallocentric legal centralist paradigm and that this has hindered feminism's engagement with legal pluralism. I will argue that theoretical work which privileges state law can at best furnish us with only partial accounts of women's experiences of law. Articulating a feminine view of the (legal) world requires an engagement with legal pluralism
Like a Mask Dancing’
Whilst the study of law and literature is now well established in the western academy, little attention has been paid to portrayals of law in African literature. In addition, studies of the colonial state by lawyers, political scientists, and historians have neglected African fiction's long engagement in this area. Achebe's fiction prefigured many of the issues engaging critics and theorists on the wider social scientific terrain. This paper draw…
Her Name Is Kamundage
This article introduces three models by which it is possible to interpret women's relations to property: the structuralist model, the interactionist model and the entitlement model. By reference to fleldwork carried out in the Kagera region of Tanzania, it discusses the potential of each model to deepen our understanding of women's relations to land and argues that none of the models taken alone is adequate fully to explain the range of ways in w…
Land reform in the shadow of the state
Note: this is an edited and abridged version of a longer paper of the same name which was published recently in Third World Quarterly, Vol.22, No.3, (June) 2001, pp.327-42. Oxfam GB is extremely grateful to the publishers of Third World Quarterly for granting permission to post Ambreena Manji’s article on this website so soon after its publication
Remortgaging Women's Lives
Mind with Mind and Spirit with Spirit’
Lord Denning played an important role in the establishment and development of legal education and lawyers' training in Africa from the late 1950s onwards. By exploring this involvement it is possible to add to existing work on Denning's vision of the role of law and legal professionalism. In post‐colonial Africa, order and stability were best assured by a cadre of lawyers imbued with the virtues characteristic of English practitioners over the ce…
Capital, labour and land relations in Africa
This paper presents a gender analysis of the World Bank's recent Policy Research Report. It assesses the implications for women, and more widely for gender relations, of the World Bank's approach to land relations. The analysis focuses on two issues: the Report's promotion of formal rural credit and its assumption of the availability of women's agricultural labour. This paper challenges the notion of 'non-contractible labour', as well as the Repo…
The emergence of African law as an academic discipline in Britain
This article examines the role of British legal scholars and institutions in the development of African law in the period from the end of the Second World War to the 1960s. In particular, it considers the extent to which the new legal scholars broke with the methods and priorities of anthropologists who had studied and developed African law in the colonial period. In editing journals and law reports, as well as founding law faculties, these schol…
Commodifying Land, Fetishising Law
(2003). Commodifying Land, Fetishising Law: Women’s Struggles to Claim Land Rights in Uganda. Australian Feminist Law Journal: Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 81-92
Law, labour and resistance to French colonialism in Sembene Ousmane's Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu
This article is concerned with the portrayal of law in colonial conflict in the work of Senegalese author Sembene Ousmane, focussing in particular on the novel Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu. There Ousmane dramutises an actual strike of railway workers in 1947 in order to mount a prophetic critique of post-independence Senegal. In convening a tribunal to try strike-breakers, the workers demonstrate the constitutive, law-creating power which, Ousmane i…
Cause and consequence in law and development
Patrick McAuslan, Bringing the Law Back In: essays in land, law and development (Aldershot: Ashgate. 2003)The title of the book sums up my overall stance: there is an important role for law in development generally and in land reform in particular and it is, in my view, wholly beneficial that after almost three decades of virtually ignoring the role of law in development ... international financial institutions, aid agencies and scholars in the W…
Legal paradigms in contemporary land reform
This article examines the extent to which contemporary land reform debates are based on assumptions about ‘legal centralism’ – an implicit insistence that the label ‘law’ should be confined to state law, and that other normative orderings are, and should be, subordinate to the state. The current orthodoxy is, in other words, premised upon a model of historical progression that leaves little room for local variation: it is assumed that as societie…
The Politics of Land Reform in Africa
Women's Land Rights and Privatisation in Eastern Africa – Edited by Birgit Englert and Elizabeth Daley
Eliminating Poverty? ‘Financial Inclusion’, Access to Land, and Gender Equality in International Development
The UK White Paper on International Development published in 2009 explicitly links access to financial services with poverty reduction. In doing so, it echoes the policies the World Bank set out in its 2008 Policy Research Report on Finance. This paper offers a detailed analysis of these development policies and connects the current plans for the expansion of financial sectors in the developing world with policies that promote the acquisition of …
Satire and the Politics of Corruption in Kenya
Corruption in Kenya has been a matter of intense concern for foreign donors and the international financial institutions. External efforts to change the ‘governance culture’ in this regard are not simply instrumental, composed of material restrictions and incentives. They are also inherently rhetorical, seeking to establish the plausibility of a set of values rooted in political economy. This paper examines two widely reported speeches of a forme…
The grabbed state
In 2002, Kenya's new National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) undertook to investigate and ensure the recovery of all public lands illegally allocated by the outgoing government. A Commission of Inquiry into the Illegal and Irregular Allocation of Public Land, chaired by the lawyer Paul Ndung'u, was appointed. The commission's report sets out the illegal land awards made to powerful individuals and families, provides important information about the mech…
Land Law Reform in Eastern Africa
The Politics of Land Reform in Kenya 2012
This article provides a critique of the final stages of Kenya's land law reform process, which has resulted in the approval of the 2012 Land Act, Land Registration Act, and National Land Commission Act. It argues that in spite of the constitutional and political importance of the new legislation, the process was marked by haste, lack of engagement by legislators, and little participation by citizens. The new laws can be viewed as a deeply disappo…
Intimacy and Inequality
Patrick McAuslan
Bulldozers, homes and highways
In Kenya road building, widely viewed as an ‘unqualified human good’, is closely linked to an ‘Africa Rising’ narrative. In this paper the author argues that road building is an attempt to assert political authority derived from a longstanding developmentalist impulse, one in which private accumulation and spectacular public works go hand in hand. In light of massive infrastructural transformations, the author develops a conceptualisation of the …
Restoring Leviathan? The Kenyan Supreme Court, constitutional transformation, and the presidential election of 2013
This paper analyzes the Kenya Supreme Court's ruling in Odinga v IEBC, a petition challenging the declared outcome of the 2013 presidential election. The case was immediately significant given the hope that recourse to the courts would help to avoid widespread civil unrest which had followed the disputed presidential election of 2007. It was also a crucial test for the new dispensation established under the 2010 Constitution widely held to have b…
The International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Act 2015
With the enactment of the International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Act 2015, the United Kingdom has enshrined an aid target in law. It is now under a legal duty to spend 0.7% of Gross National Income (GNI) each year on aid. This article assesses the implications of enshrining a spending target for development assistance in law. It argues that commentators have focused their analyses too narrowly on the legal target and t…
Political science (33 obras) · Law (27 obras) · Sociology (23 obras) · Politics (20 obras) · Law (18 obras) · Land Rights and Reforms (16 obras) · Economics (15 obras) · Geography (10 obras) · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development (9 obras) · Legal Issues in South Africa (8 obras)