Practices of Citizenship in East Africa

"This vital collection offers fresh insight into the nature of citizen engagement. Challenging liberal and universalist framings of democratic participation, the authors focus on people’s everyday habits, practices and experiences of cooperation for livelihoods and survival. Citizenship is repositioned as a gradual, learned and contextual process that spans public and private life. This highly empirical and theoretically innovative work by African and European scholars is essential reading." — Jethro Pettit, Emeritus Fellow, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK

"Practices of Citizenship is the product of an exciting partnership between scholars in Tanzania, Uganda, and Finland. It represents an innovative attempt to bring philosophical theories of citizenship and pragmatism into dialogue with empirical research in Uganda and Tanzania. The book takes local definitions of citizenship as a starting point and creatively looks at how practices and habits of citizenship are acquired, learned, and maintained in a variety of contexts, ranging from violent state-citizens relations in northern Uganda to gendered citizenship in an NGO, and Islamic morality in rural communities. This is a fascinating new approach to the study of citizenship in Africa." — Professor Aili Mari Tripp, University of Wisconsin-Madison

"This collection of essays draws from the perspective of philosophical pragmatism, which here means a focus on local practices and habits of citizenship in Tanzania and Uganda. The result is a set of case studies on the ways in which citizenship practices and habits interact concretely with local culture and context. This approach illuminates empirically the local workings and dilemmas of citizenship, and also suggests a different starting point and approach to political reform: one focused more on transformative experiences than on the promulgation of ideals, and tailored to the exigencies of these local situations and dilemmas. The authors call this "growth into citizenship." Their approach echoes in many ways John Dewey’s insight that democracy is not at heart a set of political institutions, but first and foremost a system of conjoined living."— Professor Nicholas C. Burbules, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

"This is a fantastic book that, through diverse voices, finds a way to the heart of key debates surrounding development, citizenship and learning. By building a dialogue between philosophical pragmatism and development research, it provides a refreshingly new take on the everyday experiences of citizenship amongst diverse communities in East Africa that can provide lessons for anyone interested in how citizenship and development articulate. It makes for a great read, bridging strong theoretical foundations, methodological openness and excellent empirical discussions and examples, all the while acting concretely to address North-South research asymmetries. Through this, the book is able to offer an important counterpoint to dominant interrogations and discussions of citizenship and development, grounded in the authors’ rich understandings of the histories, critical moments, institutional formations and development trajectories that shape experiences of citizenship in East Africa." — Professor Matt Baillie Smith, Centre for International Development, Northumbria University, UK