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on Africa |
| By: | Tanrıverdi Yaşar, Nebahat; Özden, Barış Alp |
| Abstract: | Turkey's defence engagement in Africa is often read through the lens of geopolitics, drone use, and conflict dynamics. Yet the deeper story is industrial and strategic. Africa remains central to Turkey's defence-export strategy because it helps resolve structural pressures within Turkey's defence-industrial ecosystem by sustaining production, easing competitive pressures, and creating external demand for an increasingly export-dependent industry. As Turkish and European companies become more closely connected, these dynamics will increasingly matter for Germany and the European Union (EU) both within Europe's defence-industrial landscape and in third markets beyond its direct reach. |
| Keywords: | geopolitics, Turkey, Africa, defence-export strategy, European Union, defence-industry, Turkish Armed Forces, Turkey's Africa Engagement, supply chains, export governance, dependency, technology, Germany, defence-industrial relations |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:swpcom:344115 |
| By: | Masahiro Kubo; Shunsuke Tsuda |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the origins of Islamist insurgencies as a form of cultural revival in West Africa. Exploiting variation in access to ancient water sources, which have largely disappeared, as an instrument, we show that the decline of trans-Saharan cities—once-prosperous under pre-colonial Islamic states—led to contemporary hotspots of Islamist violence. Contemporary violence is concentrated not where colonial resistance by Islamic states was fiercest, but where overwhelming military asymmetries induced outward submission, a pattern supported by historical evidence on weapon access. This strategic adaptation allowed radical Islamism to survive defeat and per- sist as a latent legacy. Qualitative evidence suggests ideological transmission was sustained through a religious practice of internally preparing to reassert Islamic purity. This mechanism is further supported by a dynamic model of conflict and individual- level surveys examining extreme religious ideologies. Moreover, the concentration of Islamist violence in areas that experienced reversals of fortune mirrors a global pattern. |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:not:notnic:2026-17 |
| By: | Ziaba, Isaac |
| Abstract: | How do governing parties regulate informal miners and what explains regulatory response variations? Drawing on Ghana and leveraging original and secondary data, this paper shows that National Democratic Congress (NDC) incumbents tolerated most local miners even when President Mahama raided the informal mining sector. By contrast, while the New Patriotic Party’s (NPP’s) Kufour and Akufo-Addo attacked local miners, Akufo-Addo largely let off Chinese miners and their local collaborators. These dissimilar regulatory responses arise because most local miners appear electorally more salient to the NDC. By contrast, NPP political entrepreneurs cultivated economic ties with Chinese miners while this governing party got hugely indebted to China and was accordingly constrained from sanctioning Chinese miners and their local collaborators. Taken together, I argue that the differential electoral relevancies of local miners to Ghana’s dominant and rival parties, economic ties between domestic political entrepreneurs and Chinese miners, and indebtedness to Beijing can make mining groups more or less salient to parties, producing targeted responses of repression and forbearance.Such instrumental responses undermine ASM formalization, beckoning international financial institutions to tie credit and loan facilities to concrete formalization indicators, which could compel governing elites to adopt non-partisan, holistic, practical, and long-term formalization approaches. |
| Keywords: | political parties;Ghana;China;informal mining;galamsey |
| JEL: | R14 J01 |
| Date: | 2026–10–15 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:141097 |
| By: | Holden, Stein T. (Centre for Land Tenure Studies, Norwegian University of Life Sciences); Makate, Clifton (Centre for Land Tenure Studies, Norwegian University of Life Sciences) |
| Abstract: | Population growth and intergenerational subdivision are reducing landholdings in many parts of rural Africa, while structural transformation has not generated sufficient alternative livelihoods for all households facing increasing land scarcity. Whether shrinking land ownership translates into shrinking access to agricultural land therefore depends partly on land rental markets. We use balanced household panels drawn from nationally representative surveys from Malawi, Nigeria, Uganda, and Ethiopia. Repeated observations of the same households allow us to obtain more reliable measures of land ownership and land rental market participation despite substantial reporting instability across survey rounds. We examine separately who gains access to rented land, how much land participating households obtain, and how important, rented land becomes in their operational holdings. Land rental participation among land-poor households differs across countries, with clear pro-land-poor patterns in Nigeria and Uganda and smaller, less uniform participation differences in Ethiopia. Conditional on participation, near-landless and land-poor tenants obtain fewer hectares than tenants with larger ownership holdings in Nigeria and Uganda, but no comparable gradient is found in Malawi or Ethiopia. Across all four countries, rented land accounts for a progressively larger share of operational holdings as ownership declines and substantially expands operational holdings among many near-landless tenants. Previous participation is strongly associated with current access in Malawi, Uganda, and Ethiopia, but not Nigeria. This pattern is consistent with state dependence arising from initial transaction costs and advantages conferred by established rental relationships. Land rental can therefore loosen the connection between ownership poverty and operational land exclusion, but its contribution depends on who gains access, how much land they obtain, and whether access can be sustained over time. This provides a potential mechanism for sustaining agricultural livelihoods while broader structural transformation remains incomplete. |
| Keywords: | Land rental markets; Land poverty; Operational land access; Rural transformation; Transaction costs; Sub-Saharan Africa |
| JEL: | O13 O18 Q12 Q15 |
| Date: | 2026–10–12 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:nlsclt:2026_011 |
| By: | Onur Polat (Hacettepe University, Informatics Institute 06800 Beytepe, Ankara, Turkiye); Goodness C. Aye (Department of Economics, University of Pretoria, Private Bag X20, Hatfield 0028, South Africa; Department of Economics, Landmark University, Omu-Aran, Kwara State, Nigeria); Rangan Gupta (Department of Economics, University of Pretoria, Private Bag X20, Hatfield 0028, South Africa); Sonali Das (Department of Business Management, University of Pretoria, Private Bag X20, Hatfield 0028, South Africa) |
| Abstract: | We examine the persistence of climate-risk indicators in South Africa at the national, provincial, and municipal levels using the local Whittle estimator. Using the AgERA5 monthly indicators produced by the Actuarial Society of South Africa for the period January 1981 to May 2026, we estimate the fractional integration parameter over the full sample and re-estimate it within rolling ten-year and five-year windows. Full-sample estimates indicate that aggregate drought risk exhibits non-stationary, mean-reverting long memory, lying close to the unit-root boundary at the national level. In contrast, composite risk, extreme temperatures, and extreme precipitation exhibit shorter memory. Persistence, however, is not constant over time. At the national level, the memory parameters of the composite index and extreme maximum temperature rise almost monotonically over the sample, whereas those of extreme minimum temperature drift downward. At the provincial and municipal levels evidence reveals substantial heterogeneity that broadly aligns with the country's climatic zones. Our results are robust to the use of the alternative CHIRPS dataset. |
| Keywords: | climate risk, long memory, local Whittle estimator, fractional integration, South Africa |
| JEL: | C22 Q54 R11 |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pre:wpaper:202635 |