In this unique volume, leading scholars examine how Cameroonians organize and experience their lives under Cameroonian leadership and local responses to that leadership. The volume offers essential case studies that allow us to examine the lives of ordinary people in post-colonial Africa through five lenses: politics, society and culture, economy, international relations, and migration. It places the nation's contemporary challenges within a broader political, economic, and socio-cultural context, and uses that to make recommendations for future directions. The book also celebrates areas in which the country has done well and calls on its citizens to build on those achievements. This volume is forward-looking and as such raises important questions about issues of development, ethnicity, wealth, poverty, and class.

Identity Re-creation in Global African Encounters explores race, racial politics, and racial transformation in the context of Africa’s encounters with non-African communities through various perspectives including oppression, racialization of ethnic difference, and identity deconstruction. While the contributors recognize that ethnicity has long been a staple analytical category of engagements between African and non-African communities, they present a holistic view of the continent and its diaspora through race outside of both colonial and neocolonial binaries, allowing for a more nuanced study of Africa and its diaspora.

This book highlights the complexities of nationalism and the struggles of different groups left unaddressed within the nation-states of a postcolonial world. The central question is what happened to the worldly and radical visions of freedom, liberty, and equality that animated intellectual activists and policy makers from Woodrow Wilson in the 1920s? This book analyzes the outcome of lumping disparate groups of people together under one nation-state and holding them together against the knowledge of the incompatibility theory of plural states. In a world of arbitrarily and colonially mapped sovereign states, groups, and nations with distinctive histories and cultures trapped within the borders of sovereign states want the freedom to decide their own destinies. This book challenges, deconstructs, and decolonizes Western epistemologies related to postcolonial state formation and maintenance. In examining the freedom concept that no human group ought to be determining the independence of other human groups, this book constructs an alternative conceptualization of nations and peoples' rights in the twenty-first century, in which radical hopes and global dreams are recognized as central to internal nationalism struggles.

This book promotes the notion of second chances and the importance of human services within the communities most affected by crime and the criminal justice system. Recognition of the fallibility of humans and the necessity of redemption is the first step to change our attitude toward guilt and punishment. Barring citizens with criminal records from obtaining housing, employment, education, and public benefits like Medicaid and food stamps is not only unjust but unproductive for a human society. The contributors to this volume argue that second chances are a foundational principle of the human services field.

This book promotes the notion of second chances and the importance of human services within the communities most affected by crime and the criminal justice system. Recognition of the fallibility of humans and the necessity of redemption is the first step to change our attitude toward guilt and punishment. Barring citizens with criminal records from obtaining housing, employment, education, and public benefits like Medicaid and food stamps is not only unjust but unproductive for a human society. The contributors to this volume argue that second chances are a foundational principle of the human services field.