Vernon Hewitt

A Cautionary Tale: Colonial and Post-Colonial Conceptions of Good Government and Democratisation in Africa

Abstract The term good government has figured prominently in recent development theories that have sought to link capitalism with democracy. One striking feature of this trend has been a failure to locate the term within a broader comparative literature on British colonial reform from the mid-1930s onwards. The trajectory of the term good government since the early 1990s is one that would have been familiar to the colonial reformers like Lord Hailey: from an emphasis on technical and capitalist efficiency, the term has come to signal a concern with political empowerment and, ultimately, democratisation. The article suggests that the parallel trajectories of this key concept during these two periods raises important questions about the nature of both empire and the current global order within which development theories are put into practice.

Decentring the Indian Nation

Decentring the Indian nation constitutional centring - nation formation and institutional legacies in India and Pakistan redrawing the body politic - federalism, regionalism and the creation of new states in India the continuing struggle for Indias jharkhand - democracy, decentralization and the politics of names and numbers, liberal, secular democracy and explanations of Hindu nationalism whatever happened to cultural nationalism in Tamil Nadu? A reading of current events and the recent literature on Tamil politics a response to John Harriss identity politics and social pluralism - political sociology and political change in Tamil Nadu.

Colonial tropes and HIV/AIDS in Africa: sex, disease and race

One of the features of the African HIV/AIDS pandemic has been the re-emphasis of Africas place in the global imagination as the ‘sick continent’, the ‘diseased continent’ and the ‘dark continent’. Much of the early discourse on HIV/AIDS in Africa – intentionally or not – helped to cement a longstanding outsider idea of Africa as a place where health and general well-being are determined by culturally (and to a degree racially) dictated modes of sexual behaviour that fall well outside of the ‘ordinary’. Early HIV/AIDS discourse have much in common with colonial-era narratives on African ‘venereal disease’ pandemics like syphilis in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century – noteworthy, in both instances, was the view that African people needed saving from themselves. By analysing historical responses to these two pandemics, we demonstrate an arguably unbroken outsider perception of African sexuality, based largely on colonial-era tropes, that portrays African people as over-sexed, uncontrolled in their appetites, promiscuous, impervious to risk and thus agents of their own misfortune.

Nations by Design

National Identity, by Anthony D. Smith. Penguin, Harmondsworth and London, 1991. x + 227 pp. £5.99 paperback. ISBN 0–14–012565–5. Ethnic Groups Across National Boundaries in Mainland Southeast Asia, edited by Gehan Wijeyewardene. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 1990. 183 pp. S

A King's Indian Defence?

39.50/US

The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India

24.00 hardback, S

Never Ending Stories: Recent Trends in the Historiography of Jammu and Kashmir

29.50/US

The congress system is dead: Long live the party system and democratic India?*

18.00 paperback. ISBN 981–3035–61–7, 981–3035–57–9.

Into Africa: the imperial life of Margery Perham

The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia, by Peter Hopkirk. John Murray, London, 1991. xiv + 526 pp., maps, 24 pp. plates. £19.95. ISBN 0–7195–4727‐X. Roads and Rivals: The Politics of Access in the Borderlands of Asia, by Mahnaz Z. Ispahani. I. B. Tauris, London, 1991. xvi + 286 pp., maps. £22.95 (

Deconstructing the Nation: Politics and Cultural Mobilisation in India

37.80). ISBN 1–85043–145–0.