Routledge Contemporary Africa
Ethiopia's Urban Transformation: Infrastructure, Mobility, and Authoritarianism
1st Edition
By Thomas Betschart
August 24, 2026
This book investigates the ways in which Ethiopia’s urban landscape is being reshaped by an infrastructure boom in megaproject corridors and industrial parks. Drawing on extensive immersive fieldwork, the book considers how citizens negotiate, appropriate, or resist these engineered spaces. Tracing...
The Economy of Resourcefulness in Kinshasa: Informality, Small-Scale Trade, and Social Networks
1st Edition
By Sylvie Ayimpam
June 16, 2026
How, in a context of prolonged economic and political crisis, do city dwellers reinvent the means of their survival in Kinshasa? This book answers that question. Through fine-grained ethnography, it shows how micro-social arrangements enable small-scale traders to provision the city and ordinary ...
Pan-Africanism in Dialogue: 21st Century Strategies for the Future
1st Edition
Edited
By Mary Nyangweso, Mutombo Nkulu-N’Sengha
April 30, 2026
This book considers how people of African descent can generate policies and ideas for the twenty-first century that are embedded in the ideals of Pan-Africanism. For decades, Pan-Africanism has championed an intellectual ideal that recognizes the unity of people of African descent in their efforts ...
Social Power and Politics in Africa: Magic, Religion, State, Democracy
1st Edition
By Jean-Germain Gros
April 15, 2026
This book investigates the ways in which forms of social power such as magic, religion, the state and democracy, coexist in Africa, coming together in cooperative and sometimes conflictual ways to form the essence of politics. Contrary to some assumptions, the book argues that magic and religion ...
African Understandings of Chinese Involvement: Power, Practices, and Prospects
1st Edition
Edited
By Sabella O. Abidde, Dramane G. Thiombiano
March 31, 2026
This book brings together leading African scholars to consider China’s impact on Africa’s political, economic, cultural, environmental, and social spaces. China’s power and influence on the African continent have increased exponentially in recent decades, providing a range of political and economic...
Nigeria's Street Children: Lives and Dreams
1st Edition
Edited
By David V. Ogunkan
February 20, 2026
This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the lives, challenges, and aspirations of street children across different regions of Nigeria. Drawing on insights from a range of disciplines and research methods, including extensive fieldwork and interviews as well as quantitative analysis, the book...
Ecocriticism and the Nonhuman in African Arts: The Agency of the Extracted
1st Edition
By Spring Ulmer
February 18, 2026
This innovative book examines the ways in which African photography, film, and literature are resisting environmental extractivism, using themes of interrelationality. Reminding us that we are all part of an interdependent collective, this book challenges us to act to reverse the extractivist ...
Political Ecology of African Peace Parks
1st Edition
By Maano Ramutsindela
November 06, 2025
Peace parks are imagined landscapes and seascapes created through narratives and science. This book uses a political ecology framework to explore the colonial and uneven geography of peace parks in post-independence Africa. It illuminates the regional milieus impacting these parks and the ...
The Civilian Joint Task Force in Nigeria: Counterterrorism from Below
1st Edition
By J. Tochukwu Omenma, Cheryl Hendricks
October 14, 2025
This book highlights the role of local non-state security actors in the fight against Boko Haram in Nigeria. The book examines the Civilian-JTF’s operational, strategic and tactical engagement with the state security forces as well as how they counter insurgent groups at community levels. The ...
Youth Employment Programmes in Africa
1st Edition
Edited
By Ramos E. Mabugu, Lucas Ronconi
October 03, 2025
This book investigates youth employment programmes across nine African countries, providing important insights into the world’s youngest continent by population, in which 60% of people are aged under 25. By 2050, the labour force in sub-Saharan Africa is expected to be almost double the size of the...
Apartheid and Fragmented Protest in Contemporary Southern Africa: Life Goes On
1st Edition
By Cuthbeth Tagwirei
September 26, 2025
Apartheid and Fragmented Protest in Contemporary Southern Africa examines protest movements through the lens of Apartheid Studies, the first general theory of apartheid which explores how oppression, harm, injustice, poverty, loss, and inequality persist. The book argues that apartheid, which ...
Civil Society in Zimbabwe: Insights from Matabeleland
1st Edition
Edited
By Mandlenkosi Mpofu, Dion Nkomo, Kirk Helliker
September 02, 2025
This book considers the historical and spatial dimensions of civil society in Zimbabwe’s Matabeleland region, an area suffering from severe development and democratic deficits over many decades. Transcending an organisational conception of civil society and a simplistic state-civil society dualist ...