Is violent conflict in Africa urbanizing? How do urban protests and civil war intersect? How do narratives, mechanisms and identities of contention move between urban and rural arenas? These questions constitute the basis of investigation and analysis of this unique cross-disciplinary volume. Applying diverging perspectives and methods from political science, anthropology and urban African studies, the book carefully constructs the relational and entangled nature of contemporary forms of contentious politics in Niger, Democratic Republic of Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone and Ethiopia.
Sam Kniknie is a doctoral candidate at the Conflict Research Group of Ghent University. He works on the spatial and cultural configurations of popular mobilization in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Karen Büscher is Associate Professor at the Conflict Research Group of Ghent University and has extensively studied and published on the relation between violent conflict and urbanisation in the Great Lakes Region, Central Africa.
Academic libraries (for scholars and students) in departments of (political) geography, (urban) anthropology, African Studies, urban studies and conflict studies; policy makers engaged in question of conflict resolution in Africa.