The African Affairs Reader ─ Key Texts in Politics, Development, and International Relations

African Affairs is the top journal in African Studies and has been for some time. This book draws together some of the most influential, important, and thought provoking articles published in its pages over the last decade. In doing so, it collates essential cutting-edge research on Africa and makes it easily available for students, teachers, and researchers alike.

The African Affairs Reader is broken down into four sections that cover some of the biggest themes and questions facing the continent today, including: the African State, the Political Economy of Development, Africa's Relationship with the World, and Elections, Representation & Democracy. Within each section, articles deal with some of the most significant recent trends and events, such as the prospects for democratization in Ghana and Nigeria, the factors underpinning Rwanda's economic success, the rise of political corruption in South Africa, the spread of the drugs trade, the struggle against gender based violence, and the growing influence of China. Each section is introduced by a new purpose-written essay by the journal's editors that explains the evolution of the wider debate, highlights key contributions, and suggests new ways in which the discussion can be taken forward. Taken together, the essays and articles included in the volume provide both a coherent introduction to the study of Africa and a compelling commentary on the current state of play on the continent.

Nic Cheeseman is Associate Professor of African Politics at Oxford University. He is the author of Democracy in Africa: Successes, Failures and the Struggle for Political Reform (2015) and the co-editor of Our Turn to Eat (2010), The Handbook of African Politics (2013), and African Politics: Major Works (2016), as well as the co-author of the article 'Rethinking the 'presidentialism debate': Conceptualizing coalitional politics in cross-regional perspective (Democratization, 2014), which won the inaugural GIGA prize for the best article published in Comparative Area Studies. Dr Cheeseman is also the founding editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of African Politics, a former editor of the journal African Affairs, and an advisor to, and writer for, Kofi Annan's African Progress Panel.


Lindsay Whitfield is Associate Professor at Roskilde University. She has a BA in Political Science and a BA in Economics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She completed an MPhil in Development Studies and a DPhil in Politics at the University of Oxford. Prior to joining Roskilde University, Dr Whitfield was a Junior Research Fellow at the Global Economic Governance Programme based at University College and the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford and then a Senior Project Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies.


Carl Death joined the University of Manchester in August 2013, after four years in the Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, and a year in the School of Law and Government, Dublin City University. He has conducted research in South Africa, Tanzania, and the USA, and has held visiting researcher positions at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, Stellenbosch University, and the Centre for Civil Society (CCS) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban. In Fall 2015 he was a Visiting Fellow at Yale University, through the MacMillan Centre for International and Area Studies and the Agrarian Studies Program.