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2. The social and economic cost of Egypt's prison system
- Author:
- Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights Legal Researcher and Lawyer
- Publication Date:
- 02-2022
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Arab Reform Initiative (ARI)
- Abstract:
- Legal scholars have long been concerned with how to deter crime and limit its spread. For a long time, imprisonment has been used as a tool to serve these two purposes. On one hand, prisons function as a means to deprive inmates of their liberty and deter public and private crime. On the other hand, they also seek to reform convicts in a way that facilitates their reintegration into society by adopting appropriate rehabilitation programs for each prisoner.1 Despite the general deterrent impact of imprisonment, overreliance on such penalties can also have negative consequences – particularly when prisons fail to fulfil the rehabilitation component of their role. Prisons then risk turning into a hotbed that enables even more dangerous criminal behavior. As such, some legal scholars believe that penalties that deprive individuals of their liberties are no longer considered the best or only means to create more stable and secure societies, nor to reduce crime rates.
- Topic:
- Crime, Law, Legal Theory, and Legal Sector
- Political Geography:
- Africa, Egypt, and MENA
3. Ethiopia’s Grand Renaissance Dam. The Law, History, Politics and Geopolitics behind Africa’s Largest Hydropower Project
- Author:
- Francesca Caruso
- Publication Date:
- 10-2022
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Istituto Affari Internazionali
- Abstract:
- Since 2011, the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) has provoked a diplomatic crisis between Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan, adding fuel to the already combustible geopolitics of the Horn of Africa. Despite its technical aspects, the GERD dispute has over time become a multi-layered geopolitical crisis where a plethora of actors and dynamics have been influencing the ongoing negotiations. Protagonists are no longer only Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan, and the resolution of the crisis is now dependent on factors beyond technical solutions. Moreover, the crisis seems to have become an instrument that the three countries are using to deal with issues of national legitimacy, territorial disputes and regional balance. However, while instrumentalisation can be politically expedient in the short term, all parties have an interest an equitable and regionally based, inclusive and cooperative agreement. In order to understand how multilateral organisations can contribute to the finding of an equitable and reasonable solution, a multi-layered analysis – on local, national and regional dynamics – needs to identify the main drivers for Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan.
- Topic:
- Diplomacy, History, Water, Infrastructure, Law, Geopolitics, Dams, Conflict Management, and Hydropower
- Political Geography:
- Africa, Ethiopia, and Egypt
4. Racial Formations in Africa and the Middle East: A Transregional Approach
- Author:
- Hisham Aïdi, Marc Lynch, Zachariah Mampilly, Diana S. Kim, Parisa Vaziri, Denis Regnier, Sean Jacobs, Wendell Marsh, Stephen J. King, Eric Hahonou, Paul A. Silverstein, Afifa Ltifi, Zeyad el Nabolsy, Bayan Abubakr, Yasmin Moll, Zachary Mondesire, Abdourahmane Seck, Amelie Le Renard, Sumayya Kassamali, Noori Lori, Nathaniel Mathews, Sabria Al-Thawr, Gokh Amin Alshaif, Deniz Duruiz, Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Efrat Yerday, Noah Salomon, and Ann McDougall
- Publication Date:
- 09-2021
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS)
- Abstract:
- In February 2020, the editors of this volume organized a POMEPS workshop that explored the origins of the disciplinary divide between the study of Africa and the Middle East, examining issues that span both regions (i.e., cross-border conflict, Islamist politics, social movements and national identity, and Gulf interventionism.) In February 2021, we convened another workshop, sponsored by POMEPS and the newly-founded Program on African Social Research (PASR, pronounced Pasiri) centered on racial formations and racialization across the two regions. Both workshops centered around the need for a genuinely transregional scholarship, one which rejects artificial divisions between ostensibly autonomous regions while also taking seriously the distinctive historical trajectories and local configurations of power which define national and subregional specificities. The workshop brought together nearly two dozen scholars from across multiple disciplines to explore the historical and contemporary politics of racial formation across Africa and the Middle East.
- Topic:
- Islam, Race, War, Immigration, Law, Slavery, Judaism, Colonialism, Borders, Identity, and Amazigh
- Political Geography:
- Africa, Sudan, Turkey, Middle East, Asia, South Africa, Yemen, Palestine, North Africa, Egypt, Madagascar, Tunisia, Oman, and Gulf Nations
5. Transparency of Land-based Investments: Cameroon Country Snapshot
- Author:
- Sam Szoke-Burke, Samuel Nguiffo, and Stella Tchoukep
- Publication Date:
- 03-2021
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment
- Abstract:
- Despite a recent transparency law and participation in transparency initiatives, Cameroon’s investment environment remains plagued by poor transparency.
- Topic:
- Agriculture, Environment, Law, Transparency, and Land Reform
- Political Geography:
- Africa and Cameroon
6. Do gendered laws matter for women’s economic empowerment?
- Author:
- Marie Hyland, Simeon Djankov, and Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg
- Publication Date:
- 03-2021
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Peterson Institute for International Economics
- Abstract:
- reater legal equality between men and women is associated with a narrower gender gap in opportunities and outcomes, fewer female workers in positions of vulnerable employment, and greater political representation for women. While legal equality is on average associated with better outcomes for women, the experience of individual countries may differ significantly from this average trend, depending on the countries’ stage of development (as proxied by per capita GDP). Case studies from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India, and Spain demonstrate this deviation. Especially in developing countries, legislative measures may not necessarily translate into actual empowerment, due mainly to deeply entrenched social norms, which render legal reforms ineffective. Women are more likely than men to be in vulnerable employment in low- and lower-middle-income economies but less likely than men to be in vulnerable employment in upper-middle- and high-income economies. Analysis of a 50-year panel of gendered laws in 190 countries reveals that country attributes that do not vary or change only slowly over time—such as a country’s legal origin, form of government, geographic characteristics, and dominant religion—explain a very large portion of the variation across countries. This finding suggests that the path to legal equality between men and women may be a long and arduous one. Nevertheless, the data also show that the past five decades have seen considerable progress toward legal gender equality. Gendered laws do evolve, suggesting a role for legal reforms in women’s economic empowerment.
- Topic:
- Gender Issues, Law, Women, Inequality, and Economy
- Political Geography:
- Africa, Europe, South Asia, India, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Spain
7. Crime, inequality and subsidized housing: evidence from South Africa
- Author:
- Roxana Elena Manea, Patrizio Piraino, and Martina Viarengo
- Publication Date:
- 04-2021
- Content Type:
- Research Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute (IHEID)
- Abstract:
- We study the relationship between housing inequality and crime in South Africa. We create a novel panel dataset combining information on crimes at the police station level with census data. We find that housing inequality explains a significant share of the variation in both property and violent crimes, net of spillover effects, time and district fixed effects. An increase of one standard deviation in housing inequality explains between 9 and 13 percent of crime increases. Additionally, we suggest that a prominent post-apartheid housing program for low-income South Africans helped to reduce inequality and violent crimes. Together, these findings suggest the important role that equality in housing conditions can play in the reduction of crime in an emerging economy context.
- Topic:
- Apartheid, Crime, Economics, Law, Inequality, Violence, and Legal Sector
- Political Geography:
- Africa and South Africa
8. Decolonising governance: The state and chieftancy conflicts on the Ghana-Togo Borderlands
- Author:
- Edem Adotey
- Publication Date:
- 12-2021
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- The Africa Governance Papers (TAGP)
- Institution:
- Good Governance Africa (GGA)
- Abstract:
- This paper examines the intersection between the modern state, chieftaincy, and international borders in governance in post-independence Ghana. It draws on a chieftaincy conflict in Ghana between Ave-Dzalele and Ave-Atanve, both Ewe-speaking communities in the Volta Region of Ghana and reflects in some detail on the involvement of the paramount chief of Edzi, whose is based in Togo, to show the complexities of governance in post-independence Ghana. The study highlights the tensions between the formal citizenship rules and traditional, informal rules of affiliation and explores the existing mechanisms for the resolution of such cross-border conflicts. It argues that modernist discourses on the sovereignty of the state and territorial integrity that ignore cross-border cultural ties limit effective approaches to the resolutions of these conflicts. This paper contributes to bridging the gap between country-specific chieftaincy research and research on cross-border chiefs in Africa through critical reflection on the limited literature on issues of governance that relate to the co-existence of modern states and international/cross-border chieftaincies. Ultimately, it calls for a decolonisation of African governance that recognises 'international chieftaincies' and formalises their roles in governance in cross- border areas around the continent.
- Topic:
- Post Colonialism, Governance, Law, Conflict, Borders, Decolonization, Tradition, and Chieftancy
- Political Geography:
- Africa, Ghana, and Togo