1,720,957 research outputs found
Contemporary Challenges of Democratisation and Development in Africa
Get PDFThe end of the cold war and the triumph of liberalism after the collapse of the Soviet Union had a reverberating effect on the wave of democratisation that swept through most parts of the developing world, including Africa. In spite of the euphoria of the third wave of democratisation, the economic condition in Africa looks grim. Africa’s traditional importance as a supplier of raw materials has diminished with competition from synthetic substitute and suppliers in Asia, Latin America and the former Soviet Republics. Also, in the current wave of massive capital movements to the ‘emerging markets’, Africa remains marginal. The paper argues that while democracy is usually seen as a ‘harbinger of development’, it is also recognised that the enthronement of democracy becomes more improbable in a harsh economic environment. This is to say that while democracy enhances development, it is in itself distressed by acute poverty, which threatens the very survival of individuals. While transitions towards democracy do not guarantee rapid economic development and improved human right situations, democracy should however create a window of opportunity where groups struggling for development and human rights would have better possibilities than before for realising their demands. Concluding, any efforts by Western donor countries or the IMF and the World Bank to impose political conditionality to encourage democratisation in Africa will result in mere window dressing. There is also the possibility of unstable democracies arising from a conflict between those who want to complete the democratisation process and those who want to halt it for failing to deliver the much-desired goods. The paper is a review of dynamism of contemporary democratic movements amidst different challenges in Africa. It is undertaken exploring different perspectives through desk review, theoretical interrogations and analysis of relevant data
Civil Society and the Dynamics of Democratisation in Nigeria (1999-2007)
Get PDFThe wave of democratisation that swept through the continent of Africa in the 1990s reintroduced the time–honoured debate of the relative significance of state and society in the process of political reforms. Democratisation builds upon the belief that civil society requires government that is committed to freedom of association, competitive elections, independent courts and media, and other civil and political rights. Therefore, a democratic state and a civil society are two sides of the same coin. While civil society organisations played active role in the pro-democracy struggles against military dictatorship, which finally climaxed with the institution of democratic rule in Nigeria in 1999, civil society’s active participation in democratic consolidation has been limited by some factors such as institutional weaknesses, poor funding, weak collaboration between the state and civil society, fragmentation along ethno-religious lines, among others. This paper argues that democratisation as a continuous project requires a balanced relationship between civil society and the state and the consolidation of Nigeria’s nascent democracy would require a strong civil society that is distinct, but working complementarily with the state.Key words: Civil Society, Consolidation, Democratisation, Democracy, Struggles,Nigeri
Women’s participation and gender issues in local governance in Nigeria
Get PDFLocal governance, interpreted as the active involvement of the local population in ensuring improved quality of service and leadership at the local level, involves greater participation by civil society in decision-making processes. The paper examined women’s participation and the prevailing gender issues in local governance in Nigeria. Analysis in the paper derived from an empirical study of gender issues and women participation in local governance at Amuwo-Odofin Local Government in Lagos State and Ilorin West Local Government of Kwara State. Qualitative methods such as focus key informant interviews, personal observation and focus group discussions were used to generate data for the study. The study discovered that the Nigerian society, operating largely on patriarchal sentiment, allocates sensitive and powerful political posts for men and deliberately marginalises women at the local level. Also, in the absence of a gender policy, planning and budgeting did not target gender equity goals and women’s rights and empowerment programmes were hardly implemented at the local level. Given the devolved nature of governance in Nigeria, the paper concluded that local government represents an important political space that can strengthens good governance by ensuring that women’s interests are represented in policy making and service delivery.Keywords: Gender issues, local governance, women empowerment, women participatio
South-South and Regional Cooperation for Peace building in West Africa
Get PDFThe paper appraises the existing framework for peace building in West Africa under the auspices of ECOWAS as the multilateral platform for south-south cooperation, with specific focus on Liberia and Sierra-Leone. The critical question for interrogation in the paper is the extent to which south-south cooperation framework (both multilateral and bilateral) has been successfully utilized in post-conflict reconstruction and development in West Africa. The paper argues that unlike in other climes, post-conflict reconstruction in West Africa usually involves multiple complex emergencies arising from the collapse of central administration (failed state phenomenon) and its attendant consequences. Under these circumstances, relative success has been recorded in multilateral regional cooperation in peace building and post-conflict reconstruction. The capacity for sustained post-conflict reconstruction through regional framework, is however weak due to political and economic constraints. A significant factor in the success story recorded in West Africa peace building project is the immense contribution of Nigeria, in strengthening ECOWAS multilateral peace-building initiatives in West Africa. The paper concludes that the West African experience has demonstrated the necessity of South-South and Triangular Cooperation as a more viable approach to peace building and post-conflict reconstruction.
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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