This paper investigates the connection between political settlements and foreign policy in Tanzania, focusing on how domestic power shifts impact external relations. Utilising Political Settlements Analysis (PSA), it examines the transition from John Magufuli’s presidency to Samia Suluhu Hassan’s, uncovering how elite configurations and intra-party dynamics shape foreign policy choices. The analysis draws on fieldwork, interviews and document reviews, revealing how changes in Tanzania’s political settlement – from Magufuli’s centralisation and populism to Hassan’s return to cooperative diplomacy – have influenced policies on resource management, international legal commitments and regional engagement. By illustrating the reciprocal relationship between domestic political configurations and foreign policy, this paper not only enhances the understanding of Tanzania’s case but also contributes to broader debates on the significance of political settlements in shaping the foreign policies of African states.

Women’s labor in African urban centers permeates every sphere of urban life, yet its full scope remains understated in scholarly accounts. Akinwole introduces “holistic articulation” as a method for reading African women’s discursive labor. Holistic articulation names an analytical strategy of linking discursive fragments about women’s labor across multiple archives: social history, African literature, popular journalism, mythography, and everyday expressions. By tracing these connections, holistic articulation highlights the breadth of African women’s space-making and performative labor. This approach extends existing frameworks for analyzing African women’s labor by foregrounding its discursive and imaginative dimensions.

In this article, we combine anthropological and legal approaches to interrogate the position and status of “victims” during Prosecutor v Al Mahdi at the International Criminal Court (ICC). Anthropological work on ontology and distributed agency provides a potential model for a broader reading of the category of victim. We then consider the war crime committed and propose an adapted application of international law sources on victimhood in order to develop a new legal-doctrinal approach that considers material objects and heritage as “direct victims” of violence and expands the range of possible “secondary victims” in ICC proceedings.

In the early 1980s, a group of radical African economists working at the Dakar-based Institut Africain de Développement Economique et de Planification (IDEP) were dismissed. Among them were three Ghanaian economists, Tony Obeng, Cadman Atta Mills, and Kwame Amoa, who applied a neocolonial analysis of global political economy to critique international development policies. Although the precise circumstances of their dismissal remain unclear, it was evident that their revolutionary approach to development clashed fundamentally with IDEP’s methods. Inspired by Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah’s theory of neocolonialism and the Latin American school of dependency theory, these Pan-African scholars refuted the dominant, anti-political, dehistorical, and simplistic Western explanation of Africa’s underdevelopment and urgently searched for better explanations. Drawing on institutional records, working papers, interviews, memos, and published and unpublished papers, this article centers Africans and African institutions engaged in development thinking in the larger history of economic thought in the 1970s and 1980s.

The procedure for mandatory reviews, also known as confirmations, has existed in Malawi since the colonial period. It requires that when a subordinate court convicts a person and imposes a punishment that passes a prescribed threshold, the case record be forwarded to a higher court for review. This article examines the evolution of this procedure in Malawi from the colonial era to how it is being currently understood and applied. It argues that the understanding that courts have recently attached to the procedure does not align with how this procedure has historically developed. Moreover, this understanding diminishes the procedure’s effectiveness in its function of protecting convicts’ rights. The article suggests ways of improving the procedure to ensure it remains relevant and suitable for the purpose for which it was originally established.

Two new folios from the Old Khotanese epic Buddhist poem the Book of Zambasta have recently come to light. One folio contains the word dīñu which is thrice attested elsewhere in both Old (dīñi, dīña) and Late Khotanese (dīñä) and has been puzzling. The new attestation provides context which helps to establish the approximate meaning of the word. It also provides a new shape (-u) which establishes the morphology. Most shapes (-u, -i, -ä) attest a second singular imperative middle of dīñ- “to overthink”. This finding improves the translation of several passages. dīñ- appears to be a denominal verb from *dīnā- “thought”, cognate to Avestan daēnā- “view, vision” and related to Vedic dhī- “think, reflect”. The semantic development appears to be “see” → “think” → “overthink”.

The Ghana–Togo border separates the Ewe people from their ritual spaces and objects. In Nyive, a border town divided into Ghana Nyive and Togo Nyive, these ritual spaces and objects are in Togo Nyive. The liminal space of the border complicates ritual practice by preventing community members from moving the ritual drum Aɖaʋatram (madness has led me astray) across the river and the international border. Nonetheless, communities in Nyive use ritual archives to maintain their identities in the context of colonial separation. They remake their identities through the symbolism, origin narrative, handling, and use of the drum Aɖaʋatram.