Book Resources for African Social Issues
The documents in Glickman's collection focus on ethnicity as a element in civil strife. In a country or regional context, each examines political changes which may direct ethnic competitiveness into nonviolent democratic manifestation . Generally making in abeyance the tricky question of how to get from here to there, the authors speculate on the suitability of various consociational, federal, or other decentralized constitutional arrangements; of coalition governments, proportional portrayal, and other non-winner-take-all electoral systems and Conflict in Africa; and on possible ways of lowering the stakes in national political competition, particularly by shrinking the public sector through privatization. Ironically, as numerous authors mention, many of present day wisest medicines for political reform in Africa were presciently set out by W. Arthur Lewis in his 1965 classic Politics in West Africa.
