Center of African Economies book launch and special event (Roskilde)

Book launch:

Economies after Colonialism: Ghana and the struggle for power
(Cambridge University Press, May 2018)
Lindsay Whitfield, Associate Professor, RUC

Despite Ghana’s strong democratic track record in recent decades, the economy remains underdeveloped.

Industrial policies are necessary to transform the colonial trading economy that Ghana inherited at independence, but successive governments have been unwilling or unable to implement them.

In this highly original interpretation, supported by new empirical material, Lindsay Whitfield explains why the track record of Ghanaian governments with industrial policy has been so poor.

Drawing on political settlements theory, the book offers a new way of thinking about the political economy of Africa.

It charts a path away from defining Africa in terms of neopatrimonial politics by providing different conceptual tools for understanding what kind of business-state relations are necessary to drive economic development.

Presentation of the book, and then discussion led by

• Mushtaq Khan, Professor of Economics, SOAS, University of London
• Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, Associate Professor of African Politics, University of Oxford

Special event

Professor Mushtaq Khan will give a talk on Political Settlements and the Search for Feasible Anti-Corruption Strategies

Reception lunch from 12.00-13:00

Hardback copies of the book will be on sale at a discounted price of 500 DKK

Please register for the event at http://events.ruc.dk/CAE-book-launch, by May 14th

About the speakers

Lindsay Whitfield is Associate Professor in Global Studies at the Department of Social Sciences and Business and Leader of the Center of African Economies at Roskilde University.

She is the lead author of The Politics of African Industrial Policy: A Comparative Perspective (CUP, 2015) and The Politics of Aid: African Strategies for Dealing with Donors (OUP, 2009), and co-editor of The African Affairs Reader: Key Texts in Politics, Development and International Relations (OUP, 2017) and Turning Points in African Democracy (James Currey, 2009).

Mushtaq Khan is Professor of Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) University of London, and Executive Director of the DFID-funded Anti-Corruption Evidence Research Consortium (https://ace.soas.ac.uk).

He is a leading thinker on anti-corruption, governance, economic development and political settlements.

Some of his key works include Rents, Rent-Seeking and Economic Development: Theory and Evidence in Asia (CUP, 2000); ‘Markets, States and Democracy: Patron-Client Networks and the Case for Democracy in Developing Countries’, Democratization 12, 5 (2005), pp 704-724; and ‘Governance and Growth Challenges for Africa’ in Akbar et al (eds.), Good Growth and Governance in Africa: Rethinking Development Strategies (OUP, 2012).

Ricardo Soares de Oliveira is Associate Professor in Comparative Politics (African Politics) at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford.

His research interests include the geopolitics of energy and international political economy, especially in the fields of natural resource extraction, state decay and post-conflict reconstruction.

He is the author of Magnificent and Beggar Land: Angola Since the Civil War (Hurst, 2015) and Oil and Politics in the Gulf of Guinea (Hurst 2007), and co-editor of China Returns to Africa: A Rising Power and a Continent Embrace (2008) and The New Protectorates: International Tutelage and the Making of Liberal States (2011).