Debates on the Left in Southern Africa || Collier on War & Peace in Africa: Statistics in Command

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Collier on War &Peace in Africa: Statistics in CommandAuthor(s): Peter LawrenceSource: Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 34, No. 111, Debates on the Left inSouthern Africa (Mar., 2007), pp. 168-176Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20406371 .

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168 Review of African Political Economy

out in the internationally sanctioned division of power. Moreover, with the NCP holding a bare majority (52%) in Khartoum, to give up anything would be to effectively commit suicide and have some of its leading figures dragged before the International Criminal Court in The Hague. As a result, with the signing of the CPA there is no room for any group from the periphery to negoti ate a position of any significance in the national government. Diplomacy has thus come to a dead end. Further efforts by the international diplomats will only have the effect of encouraging war and spreading the humanitarian crises.

Moreover, each peace agreement inten sifies the state crisis and brings the dismemberment of the country a step closer. The international community may not want to see Sudan disintegrate, but by only endorsing regional based peace processes, discouraging the develop ment of a united opposition, not permit ting dissidents in the peripheries to address national concerns during nego tiations, and accepting that a regime that came to power through a coup should alone speak on behalf of the nation, they are bringing about the destruction of the country.

For Sudanese of all political persua sions concerned about the welfare of their country, the way forward is clear if not easily achieved: end international engagement in the country, take back the country, and send the diplomats pack ing. For those in the international com

munity who genuinely want to show solidarity with the struggling people of Sudan, the lessons are the same. Their diplomats have misunderstood Sudan, placed their national security interests before concerns for the Sudanese people and as a result have heightened the humanitarian crisis, intensified the con flicts, and brought the disintegration of the country a large step closer. The well known southern politician, Bona Malwal, once said in utter frustration

that the only hope for Sudan would be if all the country's politicians were placed on a boat that was taken out to the middle of the Red Sea and sunk. (He graciously volunteered to be a passen ger.) I would suggest an additional boat to be sunk: one carrying all the interna tional diplomats. The only hope for a peaceful, just, democratic, and united Sudan lies with the struggles of the Sudanese people. That prospect may seem far off, but it offers more hope and is more realistic than the misplaced efforts of the international diplomats and their never-ending failed peace proc esses.

John Young, e-mail: johnr-young@ hotmail.com

Collier on War & Peace in Africa: Statistics in Command Peter Lawrence

The UK Royal Economic Society sup ports an annual public lecture which in 2006 was given by Professor Paul Col lier, the first and current director of the Centre for the Study of African Econo mies, formerly director of research under chief economist Joe Stiglitz at the World Bank, and senior adviser to the Blair Commission on Africa. Collier is now an authoritative voice on African economic development and has written a popular book due out this year on what can be done about 'failing poor countries' (Col lier, 2007). This contribution to the de bate first gives an account of the lecture and then raises some critical questions about Collier's methodology and conclu sions.



Debates: Collier on War & Peace in Africa: Statistics in Command 169

The Lecture

The subject of the lecture was 'War and Peace in Africa' and it was given in three locations in the UK, including Sheffield.' The lecture was very well received by a large audience. Collier presented his research in an unusually accessible style for an economist, and there was much in the lecture that reflected changes in the way mainstream economists treat devel opment issues. However, there was also much that reflected what is wrong with mainstream development economics.

In the lecture Collier reported on work, using statistical methods, that he and others had done, which tried to discover why Africa had had so much civil war

(see Collier & Hoeffler (2004), for the analysis informing his lecture and ear lier published results). He presented the economist's approach as 'statistical' and the method as one of looking for global patterns in the relationships between civil war and possible determining vari

ables, and then discovering whether Africa was different. Knowledge of Afri can differences would then inform policy. To do this Collier's team looked at 'everything we could find'. They col lected data over a 40 year period since 1965 for as many countries as it was available on all the usual economic variables, such as GDP per capita and export composition and volume, but also on the political, social and geographical variables such as colonial origin, ethnic and religious composition, political sys tem, and geographical and topological characteristics. They divided the 40 years into five year periods and then tried to predict the next five-year period on the basis of what they found in the previous period.

The key question was whether Africa was different. For the typical non-Afri can country the risk of civil war was estimated at 4%. For areas of Africa which had the population of a typical non-African country the risk of civil war

turned out to be 34%. The next question to ask was what determined this higher risk for Africa. The first was slower economic growth: 0.1% income growth over the period. This slow growth was largely the result of failing to diversify exports. The second 'cause' was civil war itself. Having a civil war meant that there was a 40% chance of a further civil war. However, controlling for these fac tors still leaves Africa with a higher risk. The statistical analysis showed that this was because of size. The typical African country is too small and cannot take advantage of economies of scale, espe cially in security. Africa simply has too many countries.

So if slow economic growth - indeed stagnation - was a cause of civil war, what explains the stagnation and there fore the 'accelerating divergence' at 5% a year between Africa and other develop ing countries? At this point Collier tells us what readers of this article must have been thinking up to now - that we cannot talk about an undifferentiated Africa. So what is the differentiation? For Collier, this is a matter of four differenti ating geographical characteristics: whether countries are landlocked, coastal, resource rich or resource poor. Africa is different in that many of the 50 countries are landlocked. However, if countries are rich in resources and land locked, they are rich enough to get the exportable resources out. So effectively these two categories become one. The other categories then comprise two types of resource poor countries: landlocked or coastal.

These three categories constitute roughly one third each of Africa. By comparison, among the non-African developing coun tries, the landlocked and resource poor countries constitute 1% of that group.

What Collier argues is that in the rest of the world, resource poor and landlocked areas simply do not become countries. In Africa the problem for landlocked coun tries is that they are dependent on coastal




countries which have no incentive to improve transport links. This is reflected in, the low rates of spill-over, that is, the growth induced in neighbouring coun tries by growth in one country without the neighbouring countries having done anything. In Africa growth of 1% in a one country results in growth of 0.2% in the adjoining country(ies). In the rest of the developing world this rate is 0.7%. Col lier's conclusion is, that it is no good starting with policies. for resource poor landlocked countries - which then leaves us with the other two types.

First, the resource -rich countries have enjoyed rapidly rising export prices over the last 4 or so years while US and Chinese companies have increased pros pecting activity for natural resources. However, further econometric analysis suggests that these countries suffer from a 'resource curse'. In the short run a commodity boom results in higher growth, but in the long run growth rates fall. These countries' income will be 10% up by 2010, but 25% down by 2020. The standard explanations for this outcome have been first, "Dutch disease', which in effect prices exports out of markets be cause of the highly valued exchange rate resulting from a commodity boom, and secondly, commodity price volatility. Col lier finds that the first argument is not borne out by the evidence and that the second is part of the explanation but less than half of it. What really explains the projected poor performance is govern ance. Once again, Collier and his team look for a dataset on governance and find that it is not democracy in general that determines the quality of govern ance, but the kind of democracy which

incorporates checks and balances. In other words it is 'mature' democracies that count and not the instant democra cies, of which as Collier pointedly noted, Iraq is the latest! In Africa, only Bot swana fits the bill. Here, checks and balances prevent the misuse of resource wealth and encourage economic policies that carefully control the impact of wind

fall gains through primary commodity price booms so that they do not lead to uncontrolled public expenditure and in flation.

Then we have the coastal-resource scarce countries which globally are growing faster than other economies, except in Africa. Collier argues that the reason resource-scarce Asian coastal countries grew was because they found market niches for low-wage labour-intensive goods and services and then benefited from economies of agglomeration in

manufacturing. Africa, with the excep tion of Mauritius, 'missed the boat' in the 1980s. What is now needed is a large wage gap between Africa and Asia such as existed between Asia and the devel oped world in the 1980s. But what African countries really need is to be bigger and have better security. Here Collier adds to the argument about size and security by claiming that there are economies of scale in knowledge - for example, some African countries are too small to have daily papers, which means the dissemination of knowledge and the discussion of policies is limited. Overall, Collier argues that Asia reformed faster than Africa from the 1970s onwards, both having been equally poor on poli cies and governance.

For Collier, it is the.small size of African countries coupled with their 'ethno-lin guistic diversity' as one major reason for these differences with Asia. He states that there are 2000 different ethno-lin guistic groups in African Given that most African countries have poor governance in terms of checks and balances, then the question arises4 given the success -of, non democratic countries such as China, whether Africa would be better off with dictatorship. Collier responds that in ethnically diverse countries, dictator ship is worse. The simple economic reason for this is that dictators' power depends on their own ethnic group and that in more ethnically diverse societies

where a dictator's ethnic group is in a




relatively small minority the incentive is to loot the other ethnic groups and redistribute to their own group On the other hand, in societies with less ethnic diversity, the dictator has less incentive to do this because as part of the domi nant ethnic group there is less to be looted from the rest and so there is not

much to be gained in looting the minor ity.

The next part of Collier's story is a justification for the 'big' state. His argu

ment is that African countries need a 'big' state because, especially in resource rich countries there are large revenues to administer, so that even though they may exhibit societal diversity, they can not, like the USA for example, have a 'small' state. The trick is to make the 'big state' work democratically.

Collier concludes that Africa has three major problems: the high risk of civil war and high level of insecurity; the failure of coastal resource scarce countries to globalise; and the lack of strong checks and balances in resource rich states. He proposes three solutions: peacekeeping, trade policy reform and improvements in governance. First, he argues for peace keeping forces on the ground to prevent repetition of civil war and promote in vestor security. This is necessary to generate long term economic growth which then reduces and ultimately solves the problem of high insecurity. Civil war destroys economies, there is a high risk of its repetition, and there is a disincen tive to invest in anything except natural resource extraction. Post-conflict peace keeping is often fragile and in order to strengthen the likelihood of a permanent peace, peacekeeping troops are needed on the ground. Collier produces another dataset of 66 post-conflict countries and finds that the more peacekeepers there are the lower the risk of further conflict. He is scathing about the idea that hold ing elections after conflict institutes de

mocracy and prevents further conflict. Analysis of the data shows that the risk

of renewal of conflict goes down before elections are held but increases after the elections. The reason is that before the elections, the incentive for all parties to participate keeps the peace. Once the election is held, the risks of conflict increase. This is because the winners of the election consider they have legiti

mately gained the power to do whatever they want, while the losers claim the elections were a fraud and contest the winners by going back to armed rebel lion.

Thus it is peacekeeping which reduces the risk of conflict, not elections followed by the withdrawal of peacekeepers, as happened in the DRC. Collier argues that the French provision of security guarantees to Francophone African coun tries reduced the incidence of civil war by two-thirds. As a consequence of the Rwanda conflict, France withdrew its peacekeepers and war broke out in Cote d'Ivoire. Collier argues that because of the failed US peacekeeping intervention in Somalia, the 'international commu nity' began to believe that intervention is not an option. Collier regards this view as 'dangerously wrong' and one that prevented intervention in Rwanda. How ever, the non-interventionist view has been strengthened by the experience in Iraq. But Collier cites the UK's interven tion in Sierra Leone as one that worked and of which the UK can be 'proud'.

Collier's second solution relates to the issue of the resource poor coastal coun tries having failed to take advantage of the opportunities of globalisation in the

way that the Asian resource poor coastal countries did - what he calls the 'missed the boat problem'. Collier's solution to this problem lies in changing trade policy in order that African countries can diver sify out of primary commodities. He contrasts this aim with that of the so called 'fair trade' policies which per petuate these countries as primary producers. What is needed are policies which temporarily protect Africa from




Asia in developed country markets. He argues that such policies are currently being carried out by developed countries but very badly. He takes the example of the US Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which he says is flawed, because the protection it gives is for only one year at a time - not a long enough time horizon for foreign investors to feel secure. The EU has a policy called 'Everything but Arms', but this is also useless because it prioritises poorer coun tries instead of the richer African coun tries that are more likely to break into

world markets first. Mauritius is an example of a country that broke into world markets in the 1980s thanks to the protectionist Multi-fibre Arrangement (MFA) which is now being phased out.

Finally, there is the issue of governance in resource rich countries. Collier argues that there are struggles going on within Afri can societies to effect a system of checks and balances. There are 'brave people' fighting for these and they need to be fully supported by the developed countries. He is scathing about the ability of former

African dictators to hide their ill-gotten gains in secret bank accounts. Ending the kind of banking secrecy for which Swit zerland is renowned would be one way to deter corrupt African politicians. Collier cites the case of the late General Abacha of Nigeria who had around $4 billion in Swiss bank accounts and the Swiss gov ernment had to be shamed into ending the banking secrecy that had protected him.

What is required to act effectively against corruption is to have a set of standards and codes which can be monitored. He points to the existence of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative as pro viding just such a set of standards which could be used by African governments.

Collier ended his lecture by arguing that the solutions he is proposing will help to

make aid more effective. The Gleneagles agreement to double aid and scrap debt was a populist move to make politicians look good but will not work as a strategy

for development. He argues that unless the public are better informed about what is required, namely the solutions he is proposing, the politics of these kinds of summit meetings will be gesture politics and have no effect on Africa.

What needs to be done is to inform the public in such a way that pressure is put on the next summit of the G8 in Germany in 2007 to agree to the policies Collier is proposing. His new book (Collier, 2007) 2 will be out on sale before the G8 summit so that people can be informed and politicians decisions at that summit judged against the agenda he proposes.

Critical Comments

Collier has been working on Africa for the last 30 years. He first came to notice after the publication of a study on Tanza nia's ujamaa villages (Collier et al. 1986) in which the authors argued that intra ujamaa village income differences were greater than inter-village differences. These conclusions were based on analy sis of a large dataset resulting from a survey of villages across the country but were not surprising. There was already a body of empirical work which pointed to pre-ujamaa rural class differentiation which was perpetuated in the power relationships and the continuing eco nomic power of rich farmers through their superior possession of agricultural

means of production other than land. What Collier and his collaborators did was to ignore this body of serious re search in favour of 'rigorous' statistical methods. Such methods are now well developed and allow for the possibility of finding factors, or variables, which determine particular outcomes while controlling for everything else that might affect those outcomes. Collier's latest work is another version of the same methodology with which he began his research in Africa. It is also in the tradition of much World Bank research since the early 1990s. Thus what might appear to be the breathtaking arrogance of one man who has the three solutions




to Africa's problems and a book to promote them, is largely a representation of a new Washington consensus to which Collier and his colleagues have contrib uted. The application of neo-classical economics to questions that were for merly considered to be in the political domain is a relatively new development. What Collier calls 'economics' in the context of analysing the causes of war and peace in Africa is part economics, but more, part statistics and part politi cal science of the US quantitative kind. It is deserving of a serious critique, not only on its own terms but also from a radical perspective. For Collier, economic analysis is about being 'rigorous'.3 Rig our is exemplified by mathematical method and statistical analytical tech niques, the latter analysing data and finding patterns which lead to conclu sions about causes which have some probabilistic value attached to them. Assumptions about behaviour, the so called 'priors' or hypotheses are largely based on rational choice theory. So, for example, the reasons that young men join rebel groups is because the opportu nity cost of doing so is very low or possibly zero. That is to say that because of poverty, the potential rebel fighter has little to lose by joining an armed group and risking death. As Cramer (2003) points out, this discounts the possibility that people go to war for political rea sons of belief in leaders of rebellions, or belief in an ideology that supports rebel lions. These 'variables' of course cannot be quantified. Cramer offers a much more detailed critique than is possible here of this question and some of the other questions that follow.

Once only quantitative analyses are re garded as the only rigorous way to analyse problems and find solutions, then issues arise as to the quality of the data. Data quality in Africa is known to be relatively poor. This is especially so when it comes to making judgements about governance, corruption and in equality, let alone output and growth.

However, the 'poor data' argument should not be pushed too far. It is remarkable how many times using this 'poor' data gives results that make some sense. This may be because while not giving us perfect measures, the data is sufficiently consistent over time to give indicators of change, or sufficiently con sistent across countries to give us decent comparative indicators. However, using these datasets to present confident, if not definitive, views about what causes Afri ca's insecurity problems, and therefore what solves them, leaves out whole areas of analysis which need to be included to build a complete picture.

The principal omission is history. Much of the discussion about civil wars fails to take account of historical specificity. For example, civil wars in Angola and Mo zambique in the 1970s and 1980s were the consequence of the rivalry between the USA, and its South African proxy, and the Soviet Union and to a lesser extent, its Cuban proxy. It is also, to say the least, a misrepresentation of recent African history to equate one-party states with dictatorships. One-party states var ied in their levels of democracy and extent of civil society. It is also mislead ing to paint a picture of persistent low growth rates. These rates were relatively high in the 1960s and early 1970s and most African economies were severely affected by the oil price hikes in 1973 and 1979 and the droughts in the first half of the '70s turning food-self-sufficiency into food imports. This was a period of

African industrialisation based on im port substitution, which could well, with improvements in economic management, have led to African countries being able to take advantage of export markets.

However, by the early 1980s, much pos sible industrial rehabilitation had stalled on the back of World Bank opposition to import substitution industrialisation (ISI), and instead promotion of primary com modities and 'getting prices right'. The fact that resource rich African govern

ments have misallocated and/or misap




propriated the windfall gains of primary commodity price booms, and then suf fered from slumps in prices, has led to the belief that diversification out of pri

mary commodities is the appropriate strategy for Africa. Of course it always was, which is why countries pursued import substitution. That they did this badly in contrast to East Asia, whose ability to engage successfully with world markets was a consequence of a success ful prior ISI, does not mean the strategy

was wrong then, but equally it means that an export-oriented strategy on the back of a failed ISI is not likely to be successful now. Yet that is the strategy Collier presents. Therefore he regards 'fair trade' as irrelevant because Africa should reduce its dependence on pri

mary commodities. The problem with this approach is that primary commodi ties remain African countries' main ex port earners. Without these earnings stabilising, or better increasing in the short run, these countries cannot accu

mulate resources for diversification. Where Collier is right is that diversifica tion out of primary commodities is neces sary. But he fails to point out that African countries were forced to pursue a policy based on primary commodity exports as a consequence of World Bank conditionalities. These conditionalities are not of course included in the list of explanatory variables. Finally here, Col lier claims that Africa missed the boat in the 1980s and ceded global markets to

Asia. Only Mauritius (often quoted, but hardly a typical African country, if an African country at all), caught the boat. However, it was not simply the wage differences that attracted investment to Asia - it was their relatively well educated populations and skilled labour, evident in the data from the early 1960s, that did this.

Much of the discussion about ethno linguistic diversity fails to take into account history and context. For exam ple, how do we balance Tanzania's ethnic and first language diversity with its Swahili lingua franca to produce a

measure of its ethno-linguistic diversity? Does the distribution of ethnic groups matter? Are the identified ethnic groups in these indices reflective of how people identify their loyalties? How much of the social-anthropological literature has been scanned to inform an ethno-linguistic index? Is enough of the history of ethnic identities incorporated into the analy sis? And while ethnicity appears every

where, class appears nowhere. There is no analysis of the particular forms of capitalism that have developed in Africa and the class formations they have pro duced and how ethnicity and class interact. Yet it is precisely the question of

why we find these differences in the so called 'explanatory variables' that needs itself to be explained.

The geographical representation of Af rica embodied in Collier's analysis is also open to critique. It is not clear that small countries necessarily lose out be cause of their size. It really depends where they are and what they do. Hong Kong, Switzerland, and Singapore are examples of countries where small populations do not mean they cannot develop. It is also not clear that land locked countries need to suffer any more from the poor transport facilities of their coastal neighbours. For example, high value agricultural commodities produced as a result of diversification out of tradi tional primary agricultural commodi ties, are air-freighted, rather than shipped by rail or road and boat. It is also not clear why a coastal country would nec essarily cut its transport links to neigh bouring countries because that would prevent them selling to these countries. The question that Collier does not ad dress is that if such transport policies are persisting, then that has to mean that trade policies are not liberalised between these countries. This begs the question of

why this is the case if these policies are supposed to make gains for both sides. The finding that there could be substan tial spill-over effects if trade liberalisa tion went hand-in-hand with developed




country support for the richer African countries neglects the substantial his torical evidence that poles of growth did not spill over into neighbouring coun tries or even the poorer areas of the same countries. Investment has to take place in the poorer countries at the same time otherwise they will not benefit from spill over. Without specific country studies involving some historical detail, we are a little short on understanding the rela tionships as they actually exist.

Then there are some methodological problems associated with the rigorous econometric techniques that Collier and his collaborators adopt. An important one concerns the issue of endogeneity. If we are explaining the propensity to civil war by ethnic diversity, maybe we can also explain the levels of ethnic diversity by the propensity for civil war. It is not implausible to theorise that civil wars cement diversity through promoting eth nic identity and thus generating more civil wars. This raises a more general point. What Collier tells us at the begin ning of the lecture is that he and his team collected every piece of data they could find and then without any priors set up an econometric model. What economists do, as opposed to what Collier says he did, is to have an economic model of behaviour, which is then operationalised with appropriate data, based on expecta tions of what the relationships are, hav ing derived them from the model. What

we get instead is a statistical exercise, whose results are then justified by an ex post explanation. That is a purely statis tica'l, not economic exercise. As Cramer points out, this method has resulted in finding inequality being good for peace and bad for peace in two different ver sions of the model. This suggests that not having a prior worked out model might lead to some spurious results, not least because, as Cramer again notes, inequal ity captured by the Gini coefficient does not tell the whole story about types of inequality and their different effects.

Collier is to be taken seriously. He and his colleagues at the CSAE deal with serious issues in a detailed and rigorous way. Their econometric work uses the latest techniques available and does come up with patterns which have seri ous policy implications. There are as pects of their analysis, on aid, on peacekeeping, on democracy and elec tions, which support conclusions ar rived at by very different routes by critical, radical or marxist analyses. How ever, at the root of their work is the belief that the rich economies of the world can develop Africa. Globalisation can work for Africa if developed countries spread effective democratic institutions and use their economic leverage to force govern ance upon an unwilling set of politicians such that they realise that they can

maximise their utilities by not being corrupt. This democratisation has to be accompanied by trade policies that are liberal, though with elements of protec tionism in the short run. Countries that have had civil wars need to be policed by the international community until such time as their system of governance has the appropriate checks and balances

which guarantee peace and their economy is sufficiently successful to increase the opportunity cost to the individual thinking of starting or joining a rebellion, although sufficiently attrac tive by ensuring its wages are so much lower than Asia's that they attract in vestment. Some may see Collier's pro posals as less a new start for Africa at the G8 in Germany and more a new justifica tion for an old imperialism.

Peter Lawrence, e-mail: p.r.lawrence @econ.keele.ac.uk.

Endnotes

1. The Sheffield lecture can be downloaded from:

http://www.res.org.uk/society/lecture.asp

2. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can be Done About It, New

York: Oxford University Press, Spring 2007.




3. Christopher Cramer has written two excellent papers critiquing this kind of research metho dology and its conclusions, which have had a major impact on policymakers, especially in the World Bank; see Cramer, 2003 and 2006.

Bibliographie Note

Collier, P., S. Radwan & S. Wangwe (1986), Labour and poverty in rural Tanzania: Ujamaa and

rural development in the United Republic of Tanzania, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Cramer, P. & A. Hoeffler (2004), 'Greed and

grievance in civil war', Oxford Economic Papers, 56 (4), pp.563-595.

Cramer, C. (2003), 'Homo Economicus Goes to

War: Methodological Individualism, Rational Choice and the Political Economy of War', World

Development, vol. 30 (11): 1845-1864; (2006), 'Does Inequality Cause Conflict?', Journal of International Development, Vol. 15 (4): 397-412.

Conference

Leeds University Centre for African Studies and Review of African Political Economy

The State, Mining a Development in Africa

13-14 September 2007

This conference brings together pressure groups and academics to explore three key themes: what lessons have been learnt from the resource curse days of the 70s, 80s and 90s; what opportunities for resource led growth have emerged in the 21 st century; and what resistance exists within the continent to the continued politics of dispossession and primitive accumulation that has characterised much resource extraction? The focus of the meeting will be analysis of case studies from Ghana, Sudan, Zambia and South Africa. This will not exclude other country cases or comparative contributions.

More detailed issues relate to what opportunities exist for the State in Africa to benefit from the promotion of mining and resource led development? Has Africa's incorporation into the world economy created conditions within which African states can benefit or not from increased interest by MNCs in the continents resources? To what extent are local dominant classes and political elites in Africa continuing to benefit from resource led growth while labouring classes of peasants and workers remain or become poorer from state involvement with mining companies? What resistance has there been in Africa to the new rush for the continent's resources? Here focus can lie with organised labour, trade unions and political parties and it can also lie with the need to explore micro, village and household consequences for communities that border, for example, open cast mining. To what extent is small-scale or artisanal mining a competitor with large-scale national or international mining operations? Analysis here may focus too on the role of women-headed households. This remains a still under researched yet increasingly evident phenomenon, especially where mining is a dominant feature of employment as men migrate to work and women remain in rural areas sustaining their families and communities.

Details from: Saeed TaLajooy: african-studies@ leeds.ac. uk



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Debates on the Left in Southern Africa || Collier on War & Peace in Africa: Statistics in Command

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