Centro de Estudos Internacionais

Depuis le XVIe siècle, les côtes orientales de l’Afrique s’inscrivent dans un vaste réseau d’échanges commerciaux, culturels et religieux reliant le Moyen-Orient et l’Inde.

This publication is one of the results of a conference organised in Lisbon in 2011 on the theme of African borders and their relationships with migration and mobility. The selected papers are a sample of the diverse perspectives on the general theme presented at the meeting. The African Borderlands Research Network (ABORNE) promoted this event, allowing a substantial number of its members to exchange results of ongoing and long-term research. The Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portugal) funded the research project Borders and Identity in Africa (PTDC/AFR/098339/2008) which prepared this publication.

This book brings to fruition the research done during the CEA-ISCTE project 'Monitoring Conflicts in the Horn of Africa'', reference PTDC/AFR/100460/2008. The Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) provided funding for this project. The chapters are based on first-hand data collected through fieldwork in the region's countries between 4 January 2010 and 3 June 2013. The project's team members and consultants debated their final research findings in a one-day Conference at ISCTE-IUL on 29 April 2013. The following authors contributed to the project's final publication: Alexandra M. Dias, Alexandre de Sousa Carvalho, Aleksi Ylnen, Ana Elisa Cascão, Elsa González Aimé, Manuel João Ramos, Patrick Ferras, Pedro Barge Cunha and Ricardo Real P. Sousa.

This book gathers five papers presented to the ECAS' 2013 proceedings. Following the theme of the Congress "African dynamics in a multipolar world", the challenge was to select among the 118 papers presented those which focused in the subjects of informality and space reconfiguration. The papers were selected from 4 panels: "Writing the world from another African metropolis: Luanda and the urban question", "Urbanisation and poverty in mining Africa", "Urban imaginaries in Africa" and "Managing other people's money: financial services in sub-Saharan Africa after structural adjustment". In the editing process, we assumed that the intention of the authors when submitting papers to the ECAS' proceedings was to share and collect contributions from the academic community to improve their researches. This means that all the papers in this book are considered a work in progress. The editor's work, guided by the reviewers' comments was limited: the main goal was to present the preliminary insights. The authors are therefore expecting to receive contributions from the readers and, thinking ahead, why not opening new communication channels?

This e-book is the result of a panel organized in the Fifth European Congress of African Studies (ECAS 5) that took place in Lisbon in June 2013. We thought of organizing this panel on "Press Freedom and Right to Information in Africa" since the question of freedom, especially press freedom, is presently extremely important in all African countries. However, it is not yet well known, both in the academic context and by the public.

A obra que agora se publica nasceu do projecto "Dinâmicas Sociais na Estruturação dos Espaços políticos em Contextos Rurais Africanos", no qual se analisaram, em termos comparativos, as dinâmicas sociais que ocorrem em universos rurais africanos e a participação de diferentes actores sociais nos processos de construção de espaços políticos e da sua articulação com os actores políticos nacionais, Estado, partidos políticos, igrejas, ONG's, etc. O fim dos regimes de partido-único e/ou militares em África, nos finais da década de 1980, a institucionalização dos processo de transição para regimes políticos multipartidários, impulsionou uma demanda dos actores políticos que, à margem do Estado, protagonizassem essas transições envolvendo as respectivas sociedades nacionais. O Estado Africano, que durante décadas após as independências, constituiu-se como actor social de referência, perdeu terreno para os actores sociais da emergente sociedade civil rural.