Eimhin O'Reilly

A key assumption underpinning contemporary development discourse is the notion that the imposition of Western-style institutions onto Sub-Saharan Africa will inevitably lead to Western levels of development outcomes. However, the lingering inequities between the Global North and South that have persisted since official decolonisation call this premise into question. Using the institution of nationalism as an illustrative example, this essay seeks to elucidate this discrepancy. Through a detailed analysis and comparison of a diverse set of African countries with their European colonising powers, it will apply theoretical approaches on nationalism to both the historical record and statistical data. The results of this analysis demonstrate that the development of nationalism in Sub-Saharan Africa occurred within vastly different contexts compared to Europe. Far from being conducive to development, the exogenous imposition of nationalism has had hugely negative impacts on former colonies.

20 years after the signing of the peace accords that ended one of Latin America‘s longest conflicts, security and material conditions in Guatemala have failed to substantially improve amongst the country‘s indigenous population. One worrying trend to emerge in this post-war period is the lynching of suspected criminals at the hands of large groups of people, concentrated within these traditional indigenous homelands. Due to the multidimensional nature of these expressions of community violence, they have attracted a wide array of responses from international actors, the Guatemalan state, and media sources. This dissertation will interrogate the narratives employed by these actors in relation to such lynchings using the available Spanish-language sources and identify key points of conflict with the lived reality and competing proposals of the impoverished, marginalised, and indigenous Guatemalans who are most vulnerable to this phenomenon. The conclusions reached by this analysis suggest that the attempts that have been made to curb this practice have not adequately addressed the concerns that underscore collective violence, and may be a contributing factor to the perpetuation of this mode of private justice. These conclusions have ramifications on the future of public policy in Guatemala, and in post-conflict societies worldwide.

In his book Coercion, Capital, and European States (1992), Charles Tilly charts the development of the state in Europe. Writing in the immediate post-Cold War period, he notes that “European states formed in a certain way, then imposed their power on the rest of the world”, guaranteeing that the experience of state-building elsewhere would be hugely different (p.16). This essay will extrapolate upon this line of thought, focussing on the creation of the modern state in Sub-Saharan Africa, hereafter referred to as SSA, in light of the involvement of a potent contemporary force in the region – foreign aid. Aid has been the subject of intense academic debate, lauded by donors and economists like Jeffrey Sachs, and criticised by academics like Burnside, Moore and Moyo. Using Tilly’s bellicose view of historical European state formation as its foundation, this essay will contend that aid, as an inherently external force, has led to the creation of state institutions in SSA along a vastly different trajectory than their European counterparts, with negative implications for their quality.

Although science fiction is a popular and influential genre, it has seldom been the subject of serious academic discussion. However, through an interrogation of the most prominent examples of dystopian fiction from the interwar period, this essay will contend that such an analysis grants us unprecedented insight into the preeminent social and cultural conditions of the time. Interwar dystopian fiction represents a fascinating point of departure for study, both reflecting emerging modernist literary trends and exhibiting the profound impacts that the defining historical and societal currents of the era, ranging from the First World War and the Machine Age, to urbanisation and collectivisation, had upon the individual. By both extrapolating upon these themes, and using these works as a forum for the dissemination of their personal philosophies, the creators of these works not only encapsulated the Zeitgeist of the period, they did so to such an exact degree as to accurately reflect the defining features of the eventual Nazi and Stalinist social projects. The results of this investigation suggest that science fiction, far from being mere genre fiction, can in fact act as a unique resource in truly understanding the essence of disparate cultures and societies, and is thus deserving of much deeper study.