Danai Gurira

Actress

Location: USA

instagram.com/danaigurira/

James P Habyarimana

Provost Distinguished Associate Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University

Contact: jph35@georgetown.edu

Daniel Hampton

Acting Director and Professor of Practice, Department of  Defense and U.S. Embassy Operations, Africa Center for Strategic Studies

Sector: Security Studies, Political-Military Affairs, Peace Support Operations, National Security Strategy

Contact:  Phone: +1  202-685-7354

Handley, Antoinette

Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto

Contact: 416-978-3453

Email Address: a.handley@utoronto.ca

Handley, Antoinette. “Varieties of Capitalists? The Middle–Class, Private Sector and Economic Outcomes in Africa.” Journal of International Development 27, no. 5 (July 1, 2015): 609–27. https://doi.org/10.1002/jid.3113.

Recent increases in the size of African middle classes have excited speculation about the economic implications of these developments. This review paper argues that to understand these, we must first interrogate our analytic assumptions about the middle class and its relationship to the private sector across the continent. Africa’s middle classes are born out of a different relationship with the private sector than classical theories suggest. Rather than one, homogenous middle class (or private sector), there are multiple kinds, and hence, many of our universalizing analytic assumptions about the character of that class—and its likely economic impact—may not hold.

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Source: Article abstract.

Handley, Antoinette. Business and Social Crisis in Africa. 1st ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Much of the time, when confronted with a crisis of national dimensions, businesses do exactly what we expect them to do: they look to their own survival. Occasionally, however, firms in some contexts go beyond this. Based on qualitative, country-based fieldwork in Eastern and Southern Africa, Antoinette Handley examines how African businesses can be key responders to wider social and political crises, often responding well in advance of the state. She reveals the surprising ways in which business responses can be focused, not on short-term profits, but instead on ways that assist society in resolving that crisis in the long term. Taking African businesses in Kenya, Uganda, Botswana and South Africa as case studies, this detailed exploration of the private sector response to crises, including HIV/AIDS and political violence crises, introduces the concept of relative business autonomy, exploring the conditions under which it can emerge and develop, when and how it may decline, and how it might contribute to a higher level of overall societal resilience.

Source: Book description by publisher

Handley, Antoinette. Business and the State in Africa: Economic Policy-Making in the Neo-Liberal Era. Cambridge University Press, 2008.

The dominant developmental approach in Africa over the last twenty years has been to advocate the role of markets and the private sector in restoring economic growth. Recent thinking has also stressed the need for ‘ownership’ of economic reform by the populations of developing countries, particularly the business community. This book studies the business-government interactions of four African countries: Ghana, Zambia, South Africa and Mauritius. Employing a historical institutionalist approach, Antoinette Handley considers why and how business in South Africa and Mauritius has developed the capacity to constructively contest the making of economic policy while, conversely, business in Zambia and Ghana has struggled to develop any autonomous political capacity. Paying close attention to the mutually constitutive interactions between business and the state, Handley considers the role of timing and how ethnicised and racialised identities can affect these interactions in profound and consequential ways.

Source: Book description

Handley, Antoinette. “The Business of Business Is Politics: Political and Electoral Violence in South Africa and Kenya.” In Business and Social Crisis in Africa, 117–58. Cambridge University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108635356.006.

This book examines the private sector response to a period of intense political violence centred on a struggle for control of the state in Kenya and South Africa respectively. In each case, key political elites at the heart of the state were implicated in this violence and this was therefore a high-risk area for business to venture into. Nonetheless, in South Africa, certain business leaders came to understand the need to confront and nudge the apartheid state towards political reform because they feared that their business interests might be wiped out in a racialised political conflict. On a practical level, the centralised and concentrated nature of South African capital also made it easier for business to organise, as did the overall nature of the institutions that structured the relationship between the country’s predominantly white political elites and its majority black population.

Source: Book description by publisher