New Books in African Studies

Dependency Politics: How Foreign Aid Shapes Electoral Behaviour (Cambridge UP, 2026), by Ryan Jablonski, examines how democracy operates in countries dependent on foreign aid. Drawing on over six years of fieldwork, the book investigates the relationships between international donors and domestic politicians, exploring how aid dependency shapes policymaking and influences voters’ assessments of political performance. Challenging the assumption that voters simply reward politicians for attracting foreign aid, Jablonski demonstrates that electoral choices depend on citizens’ beliefs about how politicians influence the delivery of aid. This produces a ‘visibility-uncertainty’ paradox, whereby foreign aid can either strengthen or undermine democratic accountability. Combining surveys, interviews, focus groups, and field experiments, the book revisits conventional understandings of foreign aid and political behaviour, showing how aid can sometimes lead citizens to vote against their own interests and benefit opposition candidates over incumbents. By examining the political consequences of aid dependency, Jablonski offers important insights into the trade-offs between aid effectiveness, political capture, and state capacity-building. This research makes an important contribution to the study of comparative politics, democratic accountability, and the political economy of foreign aid. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Mediating God: Muhammad Ghazali and the Politics of Divine Presence in 20th century Egypt (Oxford UP, 2025) is a fascinating and compelling intellectual biography of the Egyptian Muslim theologian, scholar, and activist, Muhammad al-Ghazali (1917–1996).  Al-Ghazali shaped the views of multiple generations of Muslim activists and was a one-time leading intellectual of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. Mediating God charts his rise as a leading theologian in the Brotherhood during the 1940s, his subsequent clash and expulsion from the group in 1953, and his extensive post-Brotherhood career during the Nasser years.To tell this story, it excavates a massive collection of writings by Brotherhood members and their affiliates, many of which have never before been utilized in secondary scholarship. Through an analysis of this collection, Mediating God provides the first in-depth view at the richly cosmopolitan and eclectic intellectual milieu of the Brotherhood and its affiliates from the 1930s through the 1960s. It focuses particular attention on the underexamined, though voluminous, writings al-Ghazali and his colleagues dedicated to charting God as real and meaningful presence in all arenas of human life, from the mundane realms of daily life to political struggles and scientific enterprises. Ultimately, by highlighting the centrality of God as an inscrutable and incalculable-yet intimately known and felt-presence in al-Ghazali and his colleagues' project of spiritual and social uplift, Mediating God provides a way of understanding modern Islamic politics beyond the scholarly framework of Islamism and attendant claims about the functionalization, objectification, and systemization of Islam in modernity.Dr. Zarate is an assistant professor of Global Humanities at San Jose State University. He completed his PhD at Columbia University and is now a historian of the modern Middle East whose research explores Islam, theology, politics, science, and spirituality in twentieth-century Egypt. His scholarship has appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies. His work combines historical research with approaches drawn from religious studies and anthropology, building on his training at Columbia University as a historian of global Islam. He has conducted extensive archival research in Egypt and the United States and works with Arabic-language primary sources.Dr. Amanie Yahia Antar is a post doctoral fellow at the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada whose research concentrates on the history of Islamophobia in the premodern era, with a focus on sixteenth century Iberia. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How has Yoweri Museveni remained in power for four decades – and what happens when he is gone? In this episode of the People, Power, Politics podcast, Nic Cheeseman talks to Mesrob Vartavarian about three important books on Uganda and his argument that the country has become a "militarised family state". Their discussion explores whether Museveni's durability rests on coercion, patronage and political manipulation or negotiation with powerful social institutions; how far today's system reflects deeper patterns in Uganda's history – and whether a political order increasingly dependent on Museveni, his family and the military can survive him.                                                                               Mesrob Vartavarian is an independent scholar based in the United States whose research focuses on democracy, authoritarianism, state formation, nationalism and political change, with a particular interest in Africa and the Middle East. Mesrob’s work examines how political orders are constructed and maintained, and the relationship between formal institutions, social structures and political power. His recent review essay, "Coercion, co-optation and kinship: Uganda's militarised family state" in the Journal of Modern African Studies, brings together three major studies of contemporary Uganda to examine the durability and transformation of Yoweri Museveni's rule.Dr Nic Cheeseman is the Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham and Founding Director of CEDAR.The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham!Transcript here Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

American Amazigh: Remaking North African Indigeneity and Belonging in the Diaspora (NYU Press, 2026) by Dr. Heide Castañeda examines the complex identity negotiations of Amazigh people—also known as Berbers—as they build community and claim visibility in the American landscape. These distinct ethnic groups, whose histories predate the arrival of Arabs in North Africa, unsettle categories of race and ethnicity in the U.S., challenging dominant assumptions about what it means to be African, Indigenous, and Muslim. Their experiences also disrupt familiar immigration narratives, revealing the complexities and challenges of legal migration processes such as family reunification and the Diversity Immigrant Visa program.In seeking to make their struggles for recognition legible within the American context, Amazigh communities grapple with conditional belonging while also bearing the legacy of marginalization in their home countries, which is rooted in colonial divisions, postcolonial nationalism, and Arabization policies, fostering systemic discrimination. In the diaspora, Amazigh identity is being actively reshaped as individuals and organizations engage with new ideological frameworks, global Indigenous rights movements, and recent political gains in North Africa, where they have long fought for linguistic, cultural, and legal equality.The Indigenous perspective has been largely missing from the literature on migration. Drawing on four years of ethnographic research, and framed around the concept of diasporic indigeneity, the book explores how the Amazigh people forge new anchors of belonging and create spaces of social cohesion. By uncovering both the opportunities and challenges presented in the American context, the book moves beyond conventional migration narratives to illuminate how identity and belonging are continually translated and reconfigured within new places. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From the mid-seventeenth to early eighteenth century, a wide network of English-speaking men, women, and children took up residence in the Ottoman Maghrebi regencies of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. There they formed expatriate communities, engaged with the societies around them, and undertook their businesses, from trading to captivity redemption to international politics.Moving beyond official diplomatic records and printed texts, Britain and the Ottoman Maghreb, 1662–1712: Merchants, Consuls, and Cultural Exchange (Oxford University Press, 2026) by Dr. Nat Cutter delves into thousands of personal letters and financial records, where we find friendship, conflict, adoration, derision, manipulation, and scandal across cultures and countries. In so doing, it offers new ways of thinking about British-Maghrebi relations in a transitional age for global trade and military-naval power, moving beyond plaintive consular complaints, gunboat diplomacy, and brutal captivity to accommodate positive cooperation and mutual benefit.These expatriates became embedded mediators, hybridised European and Ottoman cultural forms, and experienced distanciation from both homeland and hostland to enjoy and manipulate both. For them, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli were not solely sites for danger or exploitation but, as peace was progressively established with each regency, increasingly places for pragmatic cooperation, personal and professional advancement, commercial success, and enjoyment.Expansive networks of correspondence and cooperation around the Maghreb, Mediterranean, and Britain embedded the expatriates in a cross-cultural trade in material goods and information and allowed them to manipulate the course of trade and diplomacy between Britain and the Maghreb. The expatriates were less marginal, miserable, and misbehaving Britons and more embedded, canny, Mediterranean actors.Nat Cutter, Mary Lugton Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Lecturer in History, University of MelbourneThis interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.