Social movement struggles in Africa
This special issue of the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) arose from a conference held in Paris in January 2010, organised by three of the issue's co-editors: Richard Banegas, Marie-Emm...
Gendering the extraverted state: the politics of the Kenyan sex workers’ movement
ABSTRACT The Kenyan sex worker movement occupies a peculiar place in Kenyan politics – it is an important partner in different programmes and policies in the health sector, but individuals selling sex still disproportionately suffer from different forms of state and public violence and are often marginalised. This article argues that due to the gendered nature of the Kenyan state’s extraversion processes and the resulting dual accountability to national and foreign sovereigns, the Kenyan state’s approach to gender issues is inconsistent and thus produces a situation where social movements with a gender rights agenda can be both included and excluded from the national political scene. The article also explores how the sex worker movement builds on this duality of the Kenyan state when making its strategic choices about engagement with national policy bodies.
Mean field model of a game for power
Abstract Our aim is to model a game for power (equivalent to total energy) as a dynamical process, where an excess of power possessed by a player allows him to gain even more power. Such a positive feedback is often termed as the Matthew effect. Analytical and numerical methods allow to identify a set of stationary states, i.e. fixed points of the model dynamics. The positions of the unstable fixed points give an insight on the basins of attraction of the stable fixed points. The results are interpreted in terms of modeling of coercive power.