This article examines oath-taking in Sierra Leone as a diagnostic ritual through which an African state's postcolonial legitimacy is revealed and contested. Drawing on multisite qualitative research involving 102 individuals across formal courts and customary settings, it compares the distant, standardised, bureaucratic upper state with the kin-state, where authority is embedded in social proximity, ancestral cosmology, and communal memory. Courtroom oaths remain legally valid but often lose moral force through scripted repetition, linguistic distance, and detachment from credible consequences. Customary oaths generate stronger affective and relational pressure, although they may be manipulated. The analysis develops three concepts: oath ambivalence, the formal state's unease with cosmologically potent rituals; cosmological silencing, its suppression of alternative spiritual logics; and affective dispossession, the erosion of ritual seriousness when stripped of temporal, spatial, and narrative grounding. The article reframes state legitimacy as an everyday ritual practice through which symbolic orders are enacted, contested, and unsettled.
How can infrastructure structure interstate co-operation when regional authority is contested? This article examines the African Atlantic Gas Pipeline (AAGP), a proposed gas corridor from Nigeria to Morocco. Drawing on documentary process tracing (2017–April 2026) and ten semi-structured interviews (2023–February 2026), it develops the 4-L framework: Liability, Legal Lock-in, Long-termism and Linkage. These mechanisms raise the expected costs of exit and non-compliance through material exposure, legal continuity, sequenced financial commitments, and conditional corridor access. Findings show differentiated activation. Legal ordering and Long-termism generate co-ordination and reversal costs through multi-state legal work, completed engineering studies, and committed preparatory resources. Liability and Linkage are embedded in the project's interconnection and access architecture, but their full effects remain pre-operational. The AAGP supports a middle-range account of how megaproject governance can sustain sector-specific co-operation under contested regional authority. Infrastructure Institutionalism conceptualises this as sector-specific institutional layering, not an alternative theory of regionalism.
The climate change–security nexus has dominated the literature, research, policy, and security governance in Nigeria. This study argued that the framing of climate change as a security threat has led to new governance challenges and risks, creating “a single story” in scholarship. The study adopted a mixed qualitative methods approach. In-depth interviews and focus group discussions were analysed thematically and triangulated with secondary data. The findings indicated that framing climate change as a security issue in Nigeria has produced a skewed scholarly understanding of security challenges and has contributed to inertia within policy circles. In conclusion, the study contended that there is a need to account for the multiplicity of drivers of security challenges in the country, so as to be able to provide effective and adequate solutions.
The Amiche are Eritreans who were born or brought up in Ethiopia before Eritrean independence. This article focuses on the Amiche group's political and social situation. It explores the way its members perceive themselves and are perceived by others over recent years. From a social anthropological perspective, the article examines the extent to which a stable social identity has developed out of fluid and continuous inclusion and exclusion by, and within, neighbouring groups. We argue that the Amiche represent a distinct case of stable liminality – a permanent in-between status that has evolved into a social identity that is unique in its own right, rather than a temporary transitional state. Unlike classical liminality theories that emphasise transition, we demonstrate how protracted displacement and exclusion have produced a relatively stable social group characterised by their very in-betweenness.
This paper examines how traditional authorities in Kom and Bali, Cameroon, assert control over land amid competing state power and legal systems. Using ethnographic data, it shows that the fons employ hybrid strategies-symbolic, performative, and material to reinforce legitimacy and influence land governance. The fon of Bali engages in state politics and elite networks, gaining material legitimacy but losing grassroots trust. Conversely, the fon of Kom remains politically neutral, basing legitimacy on cultural continuity and moral authority. The study finds that moral legitimacy rooted in grassroots perceptions is more crucial for effective land conflict mediation than formal legal authority or political alliances. By challenging rigid state-tradition binaries, the paper highlights how both actors contribute to land tensions. It concludes that sustaining traditional authority depends on adaptive strategies and maintaining community trust and neutrality, offering broader insights into legitimacy and conflict resolution within hybrid political orders.
