Political opposition in local spaces: African experiences

The book project is called 'Political opposistion in local spaces: African experiences' and will be based on the three researchers' PhDs and long term and recent field work in South Africa, Uganda, Mozambique, Angola, Ethiopia, Sudan and Malawi.   Tema: The book aims at exploring a paradox in the current African democratisation processes: while there has been a trend of introducing decentralised forms of governance in many countries, political power has generally continued to be concentrated in the hands of the executive at central level. Through in-depth studies of central-local relationships in seven sub-Saharan African countries, this book aim to provide alternative frameworks for the understanding of decentralisation and local political spaces under dominant party and strong executive states.

Our preliminary findings indicate that decentralisation is generally motivated by achieving executive political control rather than power-sharing. Accounting for the two decades since the wave of introduction of multi-party politics started, this book argues that we have to bring politics back into our analysis of the local level. Sustained democratization is dependent on a level playing field, and in addition to understand how politics work at the national level we need further sophistication of theories that help explain how the countryside is integrated into the political syste