Journal of Asian and African Studies

This study explores Jordanian jurisprudence on Syrian refugees, focusing on their rights to livelihoods and the complexities of repatriation through a human rights framework. Guided by UN General Assembly Resolution A/59/2005, the research employs qualitative content analysis to assess Jordan’s legal structures affecting hosting policies and access to livelihoods. Findings show that while Jordan offers significant education and healthcare access, economic rights are not fully realized, with limited entry into the labor market. The government encourages voluntary repatriation in partnership with UNHCR, emphasizing a rights-based approach that aims to strengthen refugee protections and promote social justice for vulnerable groups.

By 2006, Zimbabwe had lost its reputation as a regional agricultural powerhouse and had become a hunger hotspot. Widespread food insecurity and poverty were a reality for Zimbabweans. Hyperinflation further exacerbated the difficulty of accessing basic goods and services. Revisiting the crisis years in Zimbabwe, this paper demonstrates how ordinary Zimbabweans survived and carved out new economic and social enclaves of power. As hunger worsened, food was politicized and weaponized for survival. An informal economy emerged, and various foods, including staple grains (maize, millet, and sorghum), dried fish, sugar, and oils, became a key medium of exchange, replacing the national currency. During the 2000s, food security effectively shaped and reshaped the economic, social, and political landscape across the country.

This article examines private wildlife conservation in South Africa’s Eastern Cape as a contested form of climate governance that reproduces climate injustice. Drawing on qualitative interviews and focus groups with community members and reserve officials, the study applies a decolonial climate justice framework to analyse how enclosure operates under conditions of drought. The findings show that private reserves secure land, water and ecological resilience through capital-intensive adaptation strategies, while externalising climate risks to neighbouring, land-insecure communities. Conservation enclosures thus function as elite climate adaptation regimes rather than neutral land uses. The article argues for more equitable, rights-based approaches to conservation governance.

This study examines how politeness and impoliteness shape football banter among Nigerian Premier League fans on X. From 50 selected tweets, the results show that impoliteness dominates fan interaction. Positive impoliteness appeared most frequently, followed closely by sarcasm or mock politeness and bald-on-record attacks. Negative impoliteness was also common, while positive politeness and withholding politeness were rare. Overall, the banter relies on playful aggression, teasing and rivalry. These patterns indicate that impoliteness is not simply hostile; it helps fans bond, affirm group identity and participate in the competitive spirit that defines Nigerian online football culture in online fan communities.

This paper argues that decolonizing political science in Bangladesh is best understood as an institutional and epistemic governance challenge rather than a critique of Western theory. It introduces a diagnostic framework to identify curricular deference and methodological extraction through a close reading of the University of Dhaka political science curriculum and an analysis of the knowledge-policy environment shaping research agendas. The paper operationalizes decolonization using systematic indicators of sequencing, citation geography, methodological hierarchy, and language governance, and proposes a feasible reform pathway that links curriculum design, methods, language, and institutional incentives.

Although African countries hold a significant position in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) landscape, limited research has explored how these countries perceive this global initiative. Employing corpus-based critical discourse analysis, we investigate how Kenya’s leading newspaper, the Daily Nation, has constructed and negotiated BRI narratives from 2013 to 2024. A diachronic analysis of keywords shows a shift in media focus from infrastructure and trade to broader issues such as debt, governance transparency, and environmental sustainability. Collocate analysis further reveals a perceptual transition from passive acknowledgment to more active and selective engagement, reflecting Kenya’s increasing strategic agency. It challenges binary portrayals of African countries as passive beneficiaries or victims, revealing how Kenya exercises agency within the BRI framework in the face of multilayered and asymmetric structures. It also contributes by addressing the underexplored diversity of both the forms and actors of African agency.

The franc CFA is a currency union composed of 15 sub-Saharan African countries, managed and led by France, the former colonizer. The main objective of this paper is to use the franc CFA as a case study to test the concept of authority, defined as rightful, and hence largely consensual, rule. ‘Authority’ makes a key testable prediction, namely that secondary states consent to their subordination, whether in global governance institutions, alliances or supranational organizations including currency unions, because the net benefits of membership outweigh the costs. It follows that two pieces of evidence can potentially falsify the theory: the lack of consent, or the demonstration of the absence of net benefits. The findings of the present work are that, in the franc CFA, there is little evidence of favourable economic outcomes, but that there is some evidence for net geopolitical benefits. Weaker states may gain from close ties to France, a relationship which can be strategically utilized especially in the context of a multipolar international system. France, meanwhile, gains because it preserves its zone of influence and hence strengthens its claim to Great Power status. These geopolitical dynamics help account for the franc CFA’s perpetuation.

This work analyses the Horn of Africa as a pararegion, using a trans-structural approach to evaluate the material, semimaterial, and immaterial state capacities that constitute national power through the World Power Index (WPI). Using the WPI series, three methodological principles—relational hierarchy, positional mobility, and systemic articulation—are then applied to examine the internal dynamics. The results reveal that power is unevenly distributed, trajectories vary asymmetrically, and functional linkages are fragmented. These dynamics explain why the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) operates primarily as a mechanism for crisis management rather than as a driver of pararegional transformation.

This study analyzes why political rhetoric fails to translate into policy implementation in Ghana Beyond Aid by comparing it with South Korea’s Five-Year Economic Development Plan through the lens of the Multiple Streams Framework. While both countries experienced a policy window in the decision stage, only Korea sustained implementation through adaptive policy change with attention from policy entrepreneurs. In contrast, Ghana’s agenda regressed into rhetoric and weakened streams, exacerbated by external shocks. The findings offer insights for developing countries pursuing self-reliance strategies, emphasizing the need for flexible policy change and continuous leadership engagement to sustain development initiatives beyond political rhetoric.

This paper analyses how India’s Aadhaar biometric system influences the everyday lives of the Gutti Koya, an indigenous (Adivasi) and forced migrant group in southern India. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it reveals that Aadhaar creates new vulnerabilities in accessing welfare entitlements, particularly health and nutrition services for women and children. The findings demonstrate a dual impact: Aadhaar operates as a state technology of surveillance and discipline, while its mandatory use excludes Gutti Koya households from accessing entitlements. To access care provided by the state, communities need to fit into the logic and technological architecture of Aadhaar, which they often struggle to navigate. The paper advances debates on digital governance, precarity, and citizenship among indigenous communities.

The present study examines the intersection of widowhood, migration, and sex work in Sonagachi, Kolkata, exploring how widowed women negotiate stigma, survival, and agency. Situated within feminist political economy, intersectionality, and postcolonial urban theory, the study conceptualises Sonagachi as a “subaltern counter-space” where alternative moral economies and solidarities emerge. Drawing on N = 20 ethnographic, semi-structured interviews, the article identifies a critical generational differentiation in labour trajectories and experiences of marginalisation. Findings suggest that younger widows often experience a “fragile emancipation,” utilising urban economic selfhood to rupture rural ritualised patriarchy and renegotiate identities beyond traditional bidhoba (widow) constraints. Conversely, older widows encounter a “compound invisibility”; as their bodies cease to be economically productive within the sexual economy, they are relegated to the margins of both the red-light area and the very collectives designed for their empowerment. This internal stratification produces what the study terms as the “subaltern within the subaltern,” where the political economy of visibility mediates recognition and rights. The research challenges binary understandings of empowerment versus exploitation, revealing how older women reassert ritual moralities as a compensatory strategy for declining status. Ultimately, the study calls for gender-responsive urban policies and inclusive organisational practices that move beyond paternalistic rescue frameworks to recognise the labour, dignity, and political subjectivity of ageing sex workers.

This paper examines the deteriorating rural road infrastructure in South Africa’s Eastern Cape as a manifestation of a regime of inequality, rather than a conventional service delivery failure. Drawing primarily on the South African Human Rights Commission’s 2023 inquiry, the study analyses how infrastructural neglect impairs constitutional rights to health, education, mobility and dignity. Integrating centre–periphery theory, durable inequality and infrastructural violence, the paper demonstrates how uneven investment, fiscal underspending and bureaucratic inertia perpetuate apartheid-era spatial hierarchies under democratic governance. It further demonstrates how road decay materialises as slow, embodied harm in everyday rural life. Finally, the paper highlights community-led road repair initiatives as forms of insurgent infrastructure that challenge state abandonment and reimagine infrastructural citizenship.

This article examines how Zimbabwe’s liberation war (1963–1980) fractured the spatial and conceptual boundaries between “front” and “rear,” transforming rural landscapes into operational zones. Focusing on Tanda, a guerrilla transit zone in northeastern Zimbabwe, it shows that this collapse enabled rural women to wage economic warfare against Rhodesia’s settler economy through acts of cattle sabotage, such as stealing, slaughtering, and concealing settlers’ livestock. These actions not only sustained guerrilla fighters but also destabilised the economic foundations of white minority rule, striking at cattle breeding programmes and property regimes central to colonial capitalism. The study also shows that these actions were polyvalent, blending survival strategies, revenge for colonial dispossession, and nationalist sentiment, while simultaneously challenging patriarchal control over cattle, a key symbol of wealth and authority in Shona society. It argues that Tanda women’s cattle sabotage constituted a form of economic warfare that disrupted Rhodesia’s settler political economy and temporarily reconfigured gendered power relations, without producing lasting post-independence gender equality. Drawing on oral histories and archival sources, the article reframes Tanda women’s acts of cattle sabotage as a strategic intervention in the political economy of war, linking micro-level acts, such as the killing of Phineas, an imported Brahman bull, to macro-level disruptions in Rhodesia’s political economy. By foregrounding Tanda women’s economic sabotage rather than wartime domestic roles, the article moves beyond recuperative narratives of women’s participation, situating Tanda women as active agents in Rhodesian economic warfare who targeted the settler economy through economic subversion within fractured geographies.

President Kais Saied’s victory in the Tunisian presidential elections on 6 October 2024 could be interpreted, rather than as a simple slide toward authoritarianism, as a structured strategy combining two logics: a form of populist unpolitics based on the personalization of power, the dramatization of a direct link between the people and their leader, and the delegitimization of dissent, and a domestic lawfare that functions as a form of discriminatory legalism that depoliticizes elections. These two dimensions have rarely been combined in analyses of authoritarian populism: in Tunisia, they appear to be intertwined.

This study explores the connection between the UAE religious tolerance and normalization, arguing that normalization with Israel was a diplomatic affair supported by the UAE religious tolerance values. It employs a qualitative methodology with elite interviews, and by using the theory of religious tolerance, it shows that the UAE religious tolerance policy has positively influenced the normalization with Israel since 2020. The article demonstrates the importance of religious tolerance as a supportive discourse promoting UAE and Israel normalization. This carries important policy implications, showing that religious tolerance can become a major supportive tool to promote Israel-Arab normalization.

This study investigates how Taiwan’s government gained support for lifting the ban on US pork imports despite widespread health-risk opposition. We ask whether strategic framing can elevate collective national interests over individual concerns in a precarious geopolitical context. Using a vignette experiment that randomly assigns respondents to national-benefit versus personal-interest frames, we find that emphasizing Taiwan’s international space significantly increases support for trade liberalization, whereas appeals to health risks and losses for pig farmers do not yield statistically significant effects. The results suggest that linking unpopular economic reforms to concrete diplomatic gains can suppress personal-welfare concerns in threatened democracies.

This paper explores the tripartite relationship of names, languages and cultures focusing on the Botswana society of Southern Africa. Naming is a universal process, but its basic details are unique as they reflect on the cultures and traditions of specific societies. Most African societies, including the Botswana one, have rich cultures that yield largely lexically transparent and communicative names. This paper explores how Botswana’s culture and traditions influence its naming system and how consequently the system preserves Setswana cultural practices and the Setswana language. The study uses qualitative data from questionnaires and oral interviews carried out in the villages of Molepolole and Mahahalapye in Botswana. The paper is situated within the fields of socio-onomastics and social semiotics which reveal how names are crafted from the relationships that societies have with their cultures and languages. The paper concludes that Setswana personal names are archives and semiotic resources of Botswana’s political, economic, and social practices such as chieftainship, farming and marriage.