Short Abstract

African perspectives have generated important approaches for understanding ‘wealth’. The prisms of property, inheritance and redistribution have been key. The aim of this panel is to generate debate and develop new research avenues, addressing wealth through at least one of these lenses.

Long Abstract

African perspectives have generated important approaches for understanding ‘wealth’. The prisms of property, inheritance and redistribution have been key. This panel aims to generate debate and develop new research avenues through these lenses. Historically and locally grounded studies of African settings have illuminated how people acquire, hold on to, contest, and inherit property. We invite papers on the new dynamics of property construction, investment, accumulation and ownership that are emerging across the continent. We are particularly interested in papers that explore who is investing in what kinds of property, with what finance, and with what emerging social, spatial, political or economic consequences. In relation to inheritance, what people inherit, from whom, and through which legal rules, bureaucratic processes, and extra-legal arrangements is morally freighted, yet far from static. Given the connection between property inheritance and inequalities (e.g. class, generation, and gender), there is an increasingly urgent need to explore the nuances, complexities, and contingencies in these shifts, as well as discerning common patterns. With redistribution, we invite papers that explore ways in which wealth is redirected from beneficiaries of economic systems toward those whose livelihoods fall short – or even sometimes redirected away from those who need it most. While standard approaches measure outcomes – especially income increases for the least well off – this panel focuses on redistributive processes and concealed redistributive forms, which often produce unanticipated effects. The panel thus advances ground-up perspectives on efforts to constitute, assemble and accumulate wealth, pass it on, and spread it around.

This Panel has 2 pending paper proposals.
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