Tag Archives: Uganda

Why Was Jerry Rawlings Different?

| September 4, 2012 at 12:50 pm


Jerry Rawlings development leadership

Africa has had a number of good leaders and growth stories in the years since independence. But it is had very few countries whose success spanned multiple leaders and which included a substantial increase in the institutionalization of politics, such that the country came to not depend on any particular leader.

Jerry Rawlings and Ghana are different. (more…)

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Managing Societal Fault Lines in Africa

| June 29, 2012 at 4:20 pm


The Atlantic Council’s Africa Center hosted a discussion on the book On the Fault Line: Managing Tensions and Divisions within Societies recently.

The panel was moderated by Mary Carlin Yates, former Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Africa on the National Security Staff. It included J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa Center; Jeffrey Herbst, President of Colgate University; Greg Mills, Director of the Brenthurst Foundation; Joel D. Barkan, Senior Associate in the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; and Peter M. Lewis, Associate Professor and Director of the African Studies Program at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University.

It discussed the findings from the case studies of Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Somalia and Somaliland, and South Africa, and the lessons to be gleaned from the experience of states which have made significant progress towards successfully managing their fault lines as well as those which, having failed to do so, have been torn by violence.

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How Ethnic Divisions Become Political Fault Lines

| April 23, 2012 at 8:23 pm


Africa Ethnic Divisions

What type of ethnic divisions and political circumstances are most likely to produce conflict?

There is no easy answer, but there are formulas that can provide a guide.

Joel D. Barkan, Professor of Political Science at the University of Iowa, provides a good one in his chapter on East Africa in the new book On the Fault Line: Managing Tensions and Divisions within Societies. He argues that the presence or absence of severe social divisions and their varying ‘depth’ is a function of the interplay between three variables: (more…)

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