Announcing the ninth African Politics Summer Reading Spectacular!

Join us in reading some of the latest books on African politics

(TMC)

The African Politics Summer Reading Spectacular is back for its ninth year! Join us as we read a selection of the best new books.

As always, we define “politics” broadly for the purposes of this series. This year’s selections include political science research on policing in Nigeria, migration in North Africa, and women’s empowerment in Sierra Leone. We will also be reading journalists’ accounts of the experiences of African migrants to Europe, the complexities of a trial after a tragic crime, and belonging and identity in South Africa. We’re kicking off this summer with a review of a masterful book that shows Africa’s centrality to the history of the modern world. Thanks to our wonderful guest reviewers who will be helping to cover the 18 titles we’ve chosen this year!

We hope you’ll read along with us this summer. Reviews will appear on Fridays throughout the summer months. Don’t forget to tag your social media posts about the books with #APSRS22!

Here are this year’s selections:

June 10: Howard French, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

June 17: Paul Farmer, Fevers, Feuds, & Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History

June 24: Andrew Harding, These Are Not Gentle People: Two Murders. Forty Suspects. The Trial That Broke a South African Town

July 1: Holiday break

July 8: New reads in political theory, featuring Robbie Shilliam, Decolonizing Politics: An Introduction and Olufemi Taiwo, Reconsidering Reparations

July 15: Jason Warner, Ryan O’Farrell, Heni Nsiabia, & Ryan Cummings, The Islamic State in Africa: Emergence, Evolution, and Future of the Next Jihadist Battlefront

July 22: Corrina Jentzsch, Violent Resistance: Militia Formation & Civil War in Mozambique

July 29: Akali Omeni, Policing & Politics in Nigeria: A Comprehensive History

Aug. 5: The politics of violence and aid in Central Africa, including Jason Stearns, The War That Doesn’t Say Its Name: The Unending Conflict in the Congo, Peer Schouten, Roadblock Politics: The Origins of Violence in Central Africa, and Alexandra Budabin and Lisa Ann Richey, Batman Saves the Congo: How Celebrities Disrupt the Politics of Development

Aug. 12: Recent books on refugees and migration in Africa, featuring Kelsey Norman, Reluctant Reception: Refugees, Migration and Governance in the Middle East and North Africa, Lamis Elmy Abdelatty, Discrimination & Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees, and Sally Hayden, My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route

Aug. 19: Josephine Beoku-Betts and Fredline M’Cormack-Hale, editors, War, Women, and Post-Conflict Empowerment: Lessons from Sierra Leone

Aug. 26: Assessing post-apartheid South Africa, with Evan Lieberman, Until We Have Won Our Liberty: South Africa after Apartheid and Eve Fairbanks, The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Reckoning

Sept. 2: Martha Wilfahrt, Precolonial Legacies in Postcolonial Projects: Representation and Redistribution in Decentralized West Africa