Browsing by Author "Lobban, Ryan"

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    Land Acquisitions in Africa: A Return to Franz Fanon?
    (Minda Masagi Press, 2010) Stephan, Harry; Lobban, Ryan; Benjamin, Jessica
    In order to understand the predicament facing Africa today, one has to return to a previous era when Africa faced its fight against colonalization. One hundred and twenty-five years after the Berlin Conference, a vast majority of African states remain in a position of social and political stagnation. Decolonization, which was supposedly based on the positive-sum incorporation of the newly-independent states into the international political arena, led to the dissolution of the rhetoric of “civilizing the barbaric masses”; and a new global endeavor emerged to “develop” the post-colonial state via its access to the absolute gains of the global political economy. For the majority of populaces of the Third World, however, the promises of social security, economic advancement, equal terms of trade, and the abandonment of force and racism did not shadow the decolonization process. In this context, Franz Fanon said that there is nothing save a minimum of re-adaptation, a few reforms at the top, a flag waving, and down at the bottom an undivided mass still living in the middle ages, endlessly marking time.
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    The merits of the human security paradigm : a materialist account of peasant insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa
    (2010) Lobban, Ryan; Akokpari, John
    Contemporary food security concerns in sub-Saharan Africa centre on the pertinence of food versus fuel forms of production. As the global energy market enters into the postfossil-fuel epoch, the demand on land for commercial biofuel and feedstock production threatens the livelihood of sub-Saharan Africa's sizeable peasant community. This paper examines the theoretical and paradigmatic attributes of the human security and food security rubric, and its pertinence in accounting for the social threats which threaten individuals within an increasingly interconnected global economic system. While the emergence of these neologisms of the critical security studies school represent a marked divergence from that of the traditional approach of understanding security threats, they remained mired in contestation due to their lack of theoretical parsimony.