New publications

Land Reform Revisited engages with contemporary debates on land reform and agrarian transformation in South Africa. The volume, edited by Femke Brandt & Grasian Mkodzongi and published in the Afrika-Studiecentrum Series, offers insights into post-apartheid transformation dynamics through the lens of agency and state making. The chapters have been written by emerging scholars whose analysis highlights the ways in which people negotiate and contest land reform realities and politics.

This book is based on Leonor Faber-Jonker’s research master's thesis, runner-up for the 2016 Africa Thesis Award. In September 2011 twenty Namibian skulls were repatriated from the collection of the Charité university hospital in Berlin. The remains had been in Germany for more than a hundred years: they belonged to victims of the 'German-Herero war' (1904-1908) in German South-West Africa. Faber-Jonker analyses how these human remains became war trophies, anthropological specimens, and, finally, evidence, symbols, and relics.

The footprints of the North Korean influence can be found all over Africa, most clearly in the form of monuments, museums and government buildings constructed by forced labourers. Such projects are symbols of African nationalism while simultaneously adopting the socialist realist style of Pyongyang. Less visible is the forced labour that precedes the joyful opening of a new monument. This is a chapter written by Tycho van der Hoog in the preliminary report People For Profit, North Korean Forced Labour On A Global Scale, edited by Remco Breuker & Imke van Gardingen.

André Leliveld (ASCL) and Peter Knorringa (ISS) are guest editors of a special issue of The European Journal of Development Research on why frugal innovations are increasingly important for development research. While the top-down business and management literature on frugal innovation has claimed developmental relevance, the editors in their introduction give at least equal importance to much longer-standing bottom-up development studies discourses on grass-root innovation, bricolage, and livelihood strategies. Leliveld and Knorringa are (co-)directors of the Centre for Frugal Innovation in Africa.