Barry Riddell

Sierra Leone: Urban-elite bias, atrocity & debt

Sierra Leone experienced the violent results of an undeclared civil war which lasted over a decade. The state had lost control of the countrys hinterland! Maiming, killing, and destruction dominated this part of West Africa, and the violence largely resulted from a set of programmes and policies of the countrys post-colonial government which produced pronounced and obscene elite-peasant disparities. With the termination of hostilities, the IMF and the World Bank have financially assisted the countrys recovery and rehabilitation through a set of programmes. These were dominated by the IMFs Post-Conflict scheme and the jointly-administered (IMF/WB) Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative. This paper interrogates the documents of these International Financial Institutions (IFIs) and queries such data in two senses: a) has the nations development agenda been able to recover from the debt overhang, and b) are the fundamental causes of the countrys violent past addressed? The experience of Sierra Leone provides a window into the operations of the IFIs as they impose neoliberal globalisation in the third world.

The Face of Neo-liberalism in the Third World: Landscapes of Coping in Trinidad and Tobago

ABSTRACT With global incorporation, the face of the Third World is being reshaped. This investigation focuses on the alternations caused by neo-liberal globalization and asks “how and why are the geographical landscapes of the Third World being remoulded?” Based on research conducted in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago, involving a household survey of economically-stressed neighbourhoods and an examination of national newspaper content, the investigation employs these private and public voices, along with participant observation, in order to uncover the survival tactics employed by the countrys citizens. These coping strategies have altered the face of the nation. This revised landscape reflects the blending of the legacy of the recent past with the modifications resulting from efforts to survive in the new economy. Underlying the investigation is the quest to give economic, political, and human events unfolding in the Third World a geographical expression—thus linking pattern and process, as the face of the nation is reshaped by survival strategies into the “landscapes of coping.”

A tale of contestation, disciples, and damned: the lessons of the spread of globalization into Trinidad and Tobago

Globalization has spread throughout the world, reaching into its remotest corners. At a world scale, the recent phase of this diffusion has been enhanced and enforced by a neoliberal global financial architecture. However, within many Third World countries, especially during recent decades when an integral component of their integration has been an agreement with the international financial institutions, the local acceptance of globalization has led to an intense contestation between those who win during incorporation and those who lose. In many Southern nations, the discord is muted, obstructed, or is masked; in others, though, the conflict is open and public. The author employs the voices of the winners and losers in an open and public conflict where the contestation was in fact published in the national press. His focus is the debate over the costs and benefits of international incorporation which occurred in Trinidad and Tobago with structural adjustment programmes. The country, with its democratic government and free expression, serves as a window into an otherwise murky process, for elsewhere this contest has often been unrecoverable and subterranean. Integral to the understanding of the spread of globalization into the Third World is the operation of the winners in a compradorial fashion—here, we learn how such disciples establish a national mindset which assists the international spread of globalization.

The Ever-Changing Land: Adaptation and Tenure in Africa

The vast majority of people in Sub-Saharan Africa, estimated at three-quarters of the population, live in a very intimate and close relationship with the local environment. Residing within a cultural system, a holistic framework moderates their interaction with nature. Such an association simultaneously operates at several geographical scales. The local scene is the one upon which the intimate population-environment play is acted out. But this is never direct, for it is moderated by culture - religion, modes of production, exchange, distribution, social norms, and political systems - which influences relations with the environment. Harmonization takes place on the national level and emanates from the elites who incorporate and expropriate resources from individual regions. This interaction and integration takes place within yet another context at the global level in a way that it is never benign; and which is controlled by factors such as international market mechanisms which seldom operate as a friend of the peasants. It is within such a framework that the book by Michael Mortimore and the collection of essays edited by Richard Downs and Steven Reyna should be considered. Both treat the relationship of people and the land. Ever on the horizon, in the temporal and spatial senses, is the external framework. In Mortimores work, such externality is dominated by dastardly mother nature, especially by variation in rainfall and seasonality in this locale of rain-fed agriculture. In the Downs-Reyna collection, variety is found in land tenure and how such arrangements have differed over time and across space.

Trading Down: Africa, Value Chains, and the Global Economy (review)

babwe is no excuse for not noticing obvious data that contradict his assertions made in a book published in 2005. Zerbe likens the biotechnology potential to what happened in the Green Revolution. His rendering of the Green Revolution is grossly at variance with the facts and is largely without supporting citations. There are so many major errors of fact about both agricultural biotechnology and the Green Revolution in this small book that I cannot even begin to cover them. Consequently, I will post a list of some of his most egregious errors of fact on my Web page (www.uh.edu/~trdegreg) following the publication of this review. In many ways, I hate to be so critical of Zerbe since he has done an enormous amount of research in a diverse number of areas. Unfortunately, for too many critical topics such as biotechnology and the entire exposition on the Green Revolution, he relies on non—peer-reviewed literature written by ideological soulmates which are factually in error on virtually every point. Where Zerbe lacks facts, he simply fills in his own based upon an ideological framework that tells him what they should be and not what they are. Thomas R. DeGregori University of Houston Houston, Texas

Stones of contention: a history of Africa's diamonds

the developed world. This limited conceptualisation highlights a dichotomy of the developed versus developing world that does not really reflect the actual dynamics of international interventions, which comprise the sum of efforts from developed and developing countries. Though the financial burden was borne by the developed countries, the boots on the ground in the DRC were predominantly supplied by the developing nations (32). While the book does not explicitly say so, it uses the term “international community” to refer to the countries typically associated with the developed world. However, a more expansive notion may be implied in the case of Somalia, where the book states that action by the “larger international community” awaited results of the mediation efforts of bordering states (148). A broader conceptualisation of the international community may go a long way in recognising that interventions happen at different levels and the outcome, successful or not, is a sum of these efforts. This makes it difficult to accurately identify, and therefore credit, those international, regional or national actors who may have participated variously in the process. The book uses examples such as the efforts of the South African Development Community and the international community to gain a ceasefire agreement (16) and the deployment of African Union peacekeepers followed by the UN peacekeepers in Darfur (161) to demonstrate the various levels inherent in intervention. The strengths of this book include the background material on the conflict in the DRC, the UN involvement in the DRC and the conceptual framework within which media influence is considered. While this very interesting book abounds with thought-provoking analysis and findings, the authors’ argument linking limited media influence to limited intervention in the DRC conflict is overshadowed by other causal factors pertinent to this case. That criticism notwithstanding, this book is a worthy contribution to existing literature and will greatly benefit scholars on the DRC, media, conflict and peacebuilding and policy makers and practitioners involved in humanitarian and peacebuilding interventions.

Africa: geographies of change

Let me preface my remarks by stating at the outset that I find this to be a thoughtful, well-written, and researched text for courses on the Regional Geography of Sub-Saharan Africa. It takes as it...

Tandon Yash. Ending Aid Dependence . Nairobi and Oxford: Fahamu Books; Geneva: South Centre, 2008. xiv + 144 pp. Abbreviations. Tables. Figures. Notes. Index.

this may be neither feasible nor desirable. It is often difficult to gather political support for policies targeted at very specific groups of poor people, and such policies may be concerned excessively with addressing immediate needs rather than producing long-term structural transformation. Reflections of this kind on the policy implications across the various case studies would have been interesting.

16.95. Paper.

The climate crisis is not only imminent, but in some respects is already here. As the environmental effects of humaninduced climate change become more evident, so too do the political, social and economic ramifications of the strategies adopted to combat them. Larry Lohmann’s central argument in this excellent critique of carbon trading is that the trading mechanisms at the heart of the Kyoto Protocol not only fail to address the climate crisis, but also produce new forms of exploitation and inequality that tend to perpetuate colonial-style relationships between the global North and South.

The Globalizers: The IMF, the World Bank, and Their Borrowers

In this erudite and gracefully written ethnography, Mariane Ferme explores the links between a violent historical and political legacy, and the production of secrecy in everyday material culture. The focus is on Mende-speaking southeastern Sierra Leone and the surrounding region. Since 1990, this area has been ravaged by a civil war that produced population displacements and regional instability. The Underneath of Things documents the rural impact of the progressive collapse of the Sierra Leonean state in the past several decades, and seeks to understand how an even earlier history is reinscribed in the present.