The African Studies Centre Leiden is the only multidisciplinary academic knowledge institute in the Netherlands devoted entirely to the study of Africa. It has an excellent library that is open to the general public. The ASCL is an interfaculty institute of Leiden University.
The ASCL has invited four distinguished scholars to present their research at the ASCL in 2019. The invited scholars are: Karim Sadr (University of Witwatersrand) on the newly discovered Tswana city in South Africa; Ayodeji Olukoju (University of Lagos) on UAC - Government relations in British West Africa, 1929-1941; Hussein Solomon (University of the Free State), on the Islamist militancy in the Sahel ; and James Ferguson (Stanford University) on the notion of sharing as a principle of distribution of social protection payments. You are very welcome!
How can we make sure that economic growth and development investments start benefitting the poor and those who are now excluded? Simply investing will not do the trick: the assumed trickle-down effect does not take place. Meanwhile, evidence has showed that too much inequality can be bad for societies. The World Bank and IMF explicitly advice policymakers to consider the distributive effects of their economic policies. Time to confront inequality, Marleen Dekker writes in the ASCL Africanist Blog.
In the 2018 Stephen Ellis Annual Lecture ‘What is prosperity for Africa?’, Prof. Henrietta Moore, Director of the Institute for Global Prosperity, questioned current ways of thinking about economic growth, prosperity and development. ‘How does economic growth translate into sustainable prosperity? Economic growth needs new academic modelling.’ The full text and a video registration will be published soon, but take a look at Prof. Moore's presentation and the pictures!
This is the latest volume in the African Dynamics series. In this volume scholars from Southern Africa and Europe take a refreshing look at (the history of) nature conservation in Southern Africa. On the basis of overwhelming scientific evidence, they suggest that we should enter a new phase in nature conservation: sentient conservation. For although the subjectivity of people has been rendered visible in earlier publications on histories of conservation in Southern Africa, the subjectivity of animals is hardly ever seriously considered or explicitly dealt with.
The ASCL Library will be closed from Monday 24 December 2018 up to and including Friday 4 January 2019. From 2 January 2019, the library will undergo major maintenance, and will be temporarily relocated to the nearby Library of Social Sciences. The ASCL Library will return to its own location at FSW at the beginning of March. Another relocation the ASCL Library has faced is the temporary move of some 30,000 books from the ASCL collection to the Leiden University Libraries at the Witte Singel 27.
