Regimes of Responsibility in Africa: Genealogies, Rationalities, and Conflicts

This edited collection of essays analyses the transformations that discourses and practices of responsibility have undergone in Africa since the early 1990s. In most of the continent’s countries, this period has been marked by the introduction of neoliberal reforms, partial liberalization of the political landscape, increased foreign investment, the multiplication of religious movements, the exponential growth of migration fluxes, the emergence of new media, and the explosion of the AIDS pandemic. The core assumption of the book is that these phenomena have significantly modified the way responsibility is imagined, discussed and organized in African societies, and have contributed to transforming this concept into one of the key moral ideas by which these societies think about, and act upon their present and future power configurations.
<br />To discuss this central hypothesis, the book’s contributions examine discourses and practices of responsibility in nine different settings, and reflect on the broader changes in regimes of responsibility to which they take part. By doing so, this collection of essays will offer insight that develop a stronger grasp on the interaction between moral practices and discourses, and specific political, economic and social transformations taking place today in Africa. At the same time, while focusing on case studies from the African continent, this collection enters into a dialogue with the emerging corpus of studies in the field of ethics, providing to it a set of analytical perspectives that can help further enlarge its theoretical and geographical scope.