Hugo, Katja, and Maggie Carter. (2022).Between Fault Lines and Front Lines: Shifting Power in an Unequal World. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Inequality is one of today's greatest challenges, obstructing poverty reduction and sustainable development. As the power of elites grows and societal gaps widen, institutions representing the public good and universal values are increasingly disempowered or co-opted, and visions of social justice and equity side-lined.  

This book explores the roles of elites and institutions of power in the deepening of social and economic cleavages across the globe, by asking how inequalities have reshaped structures from the local to the transnational level, and what consequences they have wrought. In addition, the contributors present examples of peaceful processes of policy change that have made societies greener and more socially just, levelled out social stratification, and devolved power and resources from elites to non-elites, or towards marginalized or discriminated groups. Based on cutting-edge empirical research, the chapters in this volume bring together conceptual thinking and a number of case studies from the Global North and South, combining different levels of analysis and a range of qualitative research methods to present solutions for closing the inequality gap.

Source: Book description by publisher

Alders, Wolfgang. “Clientage, Debt, and the Integrative Orientation of Non-Elites on the East African Swahili Coast.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 73 (2024): 101553-. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2023.101553.

Ceramic trends on Unguja Island in Zanzibar, Tanzania provide insights into non-elite political strategies on the East African Swahili Coast. Synthesizing imported ceramic data from two seasons of systematic field survey across rural Unguja with historical, ethnographic, and archaeological evidence from coastal East Africa, this paper argues that an integrative orientation toward power characterized bottom-up action on the Swahili Coast over the second millennium CE. While theories of bottom-up action have emphasized commoner autonomy and resistance to clientage, debt, and social inequality, evidence from the Swahili Coast attests to efforts by non-elites to seek entrance into cycles of reciprocal obligation as a means for recognition and social mobility—a specifically non-egalitarian orientation toward power. In response, elites competed with one another to accumulate wealth-in-people, resulting in a competitive patron-client system that prevented political consolidation. Elucidating these dynamics contributes to an understanding of how non-elite political strategies have shaped sociopolitical systems globally.

Source: Article's abstract

Hearn, Bruce, Roger Strange, and Jenifer Piesse. “Social Elites on the Board and Executive Pay in Developing Countries: Evidence from Africa.” Journal of World Business : JWB 52, no. 2 (2017): 230–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jwb.2016.12.004.

This study applies a new multi-focal actor-centered institution-theoretic approach to examine the association between executive pay and the recruitment of social elites to the board of directors in developing countries. Using a sample of 119 initial public offerings (IPOs) from 17 African stock markets to model this relationship, the results suggest that a higher proportion of elites on the board is associated with lower executive pay. This is moderated by institutional quality; that is, lower institutional quality is associated with more directors drawn from social elites and with higher pay, while the opposite is true in higher-institutional-quality environments. The findings confirm the importance of the social environment within which governance is embedded.

Source: Article abstract

Nafziger, E. Wayne. Inequality in Africa : Political Elites, Proletariat, Peasants, and the Poor. Cambridge [England] ; Cambridge University Press, 1988.

This study of inequality in Africa, first published in 1988, not only rejected the orthodox approach of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which neglected income distribution and advocated greater external economic reliance, but also the statist Lagos Plan of Action, which supported comprehensive planning, large capital-intensive state firms, and increased government intervention in peasant prices. Wayne Nafziger's political economy analysis shows how the colonial legacy, the contemporary global economic system, and the ruling elites' policies of co-opting labour, favouring urban areas, distributing benefits communally, and spending on education to maintain inter-generational class exacerbate discrepancies between regions, urban and rural areas, and bourgeoisie and workers, even under 'African socialism'. The author's policy discussion eschews technoeconomic solutions, arguing that reducing inequality requires democratising political participation as well as economic control.

Source: Book description

Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “Between Eastern Africa and Western India, 1500–1650: Slavery, Commerce, and Elite Formation.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 61, no. 4 (2019): 805–34. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417519000276.

This essay examines relations between eastern Africa and western India in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in respect to two related sets of problems: the changing regimes of commercial circulation, and more particularly the evolution of patterns of human movement, notably via the slave trade from Ethiopia and the Swahili coast to Gujarat and the Deccan. It argues that over the course of the sixteenth century, commercial relations between Deccan ports such as Goa and Chaul, and the Swahili coast, came to be strengthened through the intervention of the Portuguese and their military-commercial system. At the same time, large numbers of African slaves reached the Muslim states in India, especially in the period after 1530, where they played a significant role as military specialists, and eventually as elite political and cultural actors. The shifting geographical dimensions of the African presence in India are emphasized, beginning in western Gujarat and winding up in the Deccan Sultanates. This contrasts markedly with the African experience elsewhere, where the meaning and institutional context of slavery were quite different.

Source: Essay's abstract

Igoe, Jim. “Becoming Indigenous Peoples: Difference, Inequality, and the Globalization of East African Identity Politics.” African Affairs (London) 105, no. 420 (2006): 399–420. https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adi127.

Although the term ‘indigenous’ implies a state preceding that which is foreign or acquired, indigenous movements in Africa are a recent phenomenon. Drawing from the author’s research of the Tanzanian indigenous peoples’ movement in the 1990s, this article argues that indigenous identity in Tanzania does not represent miraculously preserved pre-colonial traditions or even a special sort of marginalization. Rather, it reflects the convergence of existing identity categories with shifting global structures of development and governance. Specifically, it reflects a combination of ‘cultural distinctiveness’ and effective strategies of extraversion in the context of economic and political liberalization. The Maasai, who are ‘culturally distinct’, and who have a long tradition of enrolling outsiders in their cause, naturally dominate this movement.

Source: Article's abstract