African Political systems. Africa in international relations;
Development issues:gender, health, education,security,environment
; citizeenship and nation building and governance reforms in
Sub-saharan Africa; poverty eand poverty alleviation policies and
priorities. Africa in the cold war with reference to Southen Africa
and focus on Mozambique.
The study of Africa in the context of the new challenges posed
by the economic social and political transitions of the last twenty
years in which political liberalization plays an important role in
this process of change .History, democracy and integration are
recurrent themes in African social science research. The research
focus is on Southern Africa differentiated and united by
specific relationships of domination and exploitation established
during the colonial period and the logic of the cold war dtermnant
in to the shaping of the state and the articulation of
state-society relations.
The civil war in Mozambique and Angola, the persistence in
South Africa of a racial racist regime , the descent to
despotism in Zimbabwe are in fact, closely linked to a history that
goes back to the period before independence and have successively
been shaped by international and regional interlinking factors and
policies. Repressive political regimes during the colonial and
postcolonial periods supported by cold war priorities have made
difficult the transition to democracy in a context of national
integration .
The focus of the research, undertaken as a comparative
multi-disciplinary project, is on how history and policies in the
interplay between international regional and local priorities have
shaped the dynamic of identity and citizenship that is the
historical trends in citizenship and identity formation in
post-independence Africa; the popular mobilisation of citizenship
and identity ‘from below' and the responses which they elicit ‘from
above”; t he different dimensions of multiple identities that exist
in contemporary Africa and the extent to which these are
accommodated within prevailing notions of citizenship and systems
of governance, including electoral regimes, politico-administrative
decentralisation and federalism.
