From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel
The Road to Nongovernmentality

This book explains the shift from the government of empires to that of NGOs in the region just south of the Sahara.

Gregory Mann (Author)

9781107602526, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 29 December 2014

300 pages, 3 b/w illus. 3 maps
22.6 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm, 0.41 kg

'This well-researched and written book surveys the pursuit and practice of sovereignty in the Sahel, notably Soudan/Mali … This innovative and insightful book includes maps and deserves inclusion in research university libraries. Summing up: highly recommended.' P. C. Naylor, Choice

This book looks beyond the familiar history of former empires and new nation-states to consider newly transnational communities of solidarity and aid, social science and activism. Shortly after independence from France in 1960, the people living along the Sahel - a long, thin stretch of land bordering the Sahara - became the subjects of human rights campaigns and humanitarian interventions. Just when its states were strongest and most ambitious, the postcolonial West African Sahel became fertile terrain for the production of novel forms of governmental rationality realized through NGOs. The roots of this 'nongovernmentality' lay partly in Europe and North America, but it flowered, paradoxically, in the Sahel. This book is unique in that it questions not only how West African states exercised their new sovereignty but also how and why NGOs - ranging from CARE and Amnesty International to black internationalists - began to assume elements of sovereignty during a period in which it was so highly valued.

1. Knowing the post-colony
2. A new republic
3. 'French' Muslims in Sudan
4. West Africans as foreigners in postimperial France
5. Governing famine
6. Human rights and Saharan prisons.

Subject Areas: African history [HBJH], History [HB]