Permanent Emergency Welfare Regimes in Sub-Saharan Africa The Exclusive Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy

This book examines the relationship between development economics, social protection and democratization in the specific context of Sub-Saharan Africa. Moving existing theories of transformation into a new terrain, it sheds light on the exclusive origins of dictatorship and democracy. The book explains how development, social protection and democracy-enhancing policies have been produced by existing institutional frameworks and contingent responses to emergency events, and that these have themselves been shaped by the actions of actors and by their embeddedness in the surrounding political, economic, cultural and social environment. The book also draws attention to the most relevant institutional and social mechanisms, with associated elite strategies and power politics relations in the creation of politically-induced conflicts. In doing so, it highlights the important role of welfare institutions in the reduction and reproduction of vertical and horizontal inequalities as well as their repercussion in the emergence of social conflicts.

Alfio Cerami has been Research Associate at the Centre d'études européennes at Sciences Po, France and an international consultant for the UNICEF. He has also held appointments at University of Erfurt, Germany, at the Centre for German and European Studies of the State University of St Petersburg, Russia and at Southern Methodist University in Paris, France. His research concentrates on how political, economic, and social transformations influence the process of democratization and of consolidation of democratic institutions.

1. Introduction: Permanent Emergency Welfare Regimes in Sub-Saharan Africa
2. Theoretical Framework: Democracy, System Transformation and Welfare Regimes
PART I: KEY ISSUES AND PARAMETERS
3. Pathways of Development
4. Systemic Problems and Structural Challenges
5. Poverty and Human Development
PART II: SOCIAL PROTECTION
6. Labour Market, Poverty Relief and Health
7. Education, Child Protection, and Gender Equality
8. Hunger, Food Security, Safe Water and Sanitation
PART III: SOCIAL CONFLICTS, MODERNIZATION AND DEMOCRATIZATION
9. Social Conflicts and the Politics of Inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa
10. Democratization and Consolidation of Democratic Institutions
11. Conclusions: The Exclusive Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy