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- Stream:
- Anthropology, religion and conflict
- Location:
- G52
Short Abstract
none
Long Abstract
Individual papers by:
Dafne Accoroni
Martha Chinouya
Darko Opoku
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper long abstract
The paper will address the events of the Parisian banlieus (October-November 2005) to reflect on: 1) Islam as an emerging actor in the public arena and 2) how the social discourse has incorporated it. The analysis will attempt to show how Islam, which identifies the private sphere of the individuals' practice and faith in Allah and the Koran, has become synonym and social mark of a community. People of West and North African origin, whether migrants of first generation or born to migrant parents and brought up in France, bear the stigma of a colonial past which evokes times of exploitation and war - the Algerian war of Independence (1954-1962). Islamic affiliation is fictitiously deemed to be the responsible for their social exclusion, because of its incompatibility with the Republican values; thus, a very sensitive chapter of the French history (past and present) is obliterated. Where Islam stands as a self-evident category used to interpret different realities, dynamics and origins summarily lumped together, much is still left to its understanding and to what it is supposed to explain.
The paper will argue that the riots of the banlieus decried nothing more than the social blight and exclusion of a people left at the margins, with no much hope for social promotion and recognition. Methodologically, the author will base the analysis on the data collected during her fieldwork in Paris (summer 2005- up to present).
Paper long abstract
By 1990, IMF-World Bank-inspired programme of reforms in Africa had widened from their initially very economistic nature to include, among other things, democratisation. Democracy had been promoted on the grounds that it would check arbitrary power and facilitate market reforms. This argument would seem at first sight to be appropriate to the case of Ghana: the PNDC’s assault on private property had owed much to its authoritarian and unaccountable character. To what extent, however, was this expectation actually borne out? The evidence suggests that, at least in the short term, democratisation did not have an unambiguously beneficial effect on government-business relations in Ghana. In fact, it added another dimension to the antagonism in government-business relations, and this antagonsim intensified in the run-up to the 1992 elections through into 1993.
This paper sheds light on this issue by considering the nature of the relations between the PNDC, the quasi-military government headed by Flt. Lt. Jerry Rawlings and Ghana’s business community. Rawlings had taken punitive actions against leading Ghanaian businesspeople under both his AFRC and PNDC governments and was, as a result, deeply hated by them. This crop of entrepreneurs had a clear stake, therefore, in Rawlings’ defeat and many backed the leading opposition party that emerged in the 1990s. Several of the key entrepreneurs also had demonstrable presidential ambitions. The onset of the democratisation process therefore entailed countervailing tendencies towards the harassment of suspected opposition supporters in the business community.