Critical Themes in African Studies

We are pleased to announce the inauguration of "Critical Themes in African Studies," a new series of short books to be published by the African Studies Center, with assistance from our national Title VI Comprehensive Language and Area Studies grant. Each book will provide a broad synthesis of the scholarly debates on a major topic, present illustrative case studies in some detail, and include an extensive and annotated list of resources.

The first book in this new series is now available:

Crawford Young’s Ethnicity and Politics in Africa. Pp. iv, 102. $15.00 paper.
In his Introduction, Young lays out the principal ways of looking at the phenomenon of ethnicity and shows how these have changed over the past century and how they apply to politics in Africa. He then presents three different African case studies—Tanzania, where potential ethnic conflict has remained at a low intensity; Uganda, where ethnic and religious divisions have played a much more central role in politics and ethnicity has become militarized; and Congo-Kinshasa, where the nature of ethnicity is evolving in response to sustained violence, and where the survival of the state itself is at issue. A final chapter considers the challenge of accommodating ethnic difference that faces contemporary African states. An annotated bibliography presents a wide range of print and electronic resources for further study and suggests which books and sites are of particular interest to nonspecialists.
Crawford Young is a distinguished political scientist whose research on African politics, ethnicity, and development spans forty years. He has published seven books, five edited collections, and more than 80 articles. In 1991 he was given the Distinguished Africanist award of the African Studies Association, and several of his books have won prizes from both the ASA and the American Political Science Association.

Further information will be posted on this site as books become available. In the meantime, please contact Michael DiBlasi (mdib@bu.edu) if you have any questions.

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