In July 2010, more than 600 scholars from around the world gathered at Kadir Has University in Istanbul to exchange ideas and research findings on civil society. The occasion was the 9th international conference of the International Society for Third-Sector Research (ISTR), whose theme this year was “Facing Crises: Challenges and Opportunities Confronting the Third Sector and Civil Society.”
Regrettably, no more than 20 of the participants were Africans. Yet the marginalization of African knowledge would have been decidedly worse without TrustAfrica, which provided support for 14 of these African researchers to attend the conference.
Working closely with ISTR, TrustAfrica organized a full-day workshop on ‘democratic governance in Africa and the public sphere.’ A public call for contributions drew more than 50 abstracts—14 of which were accepted, developed further, and presented at the conference. Here is a list of the researchers and the titles of their papers:
- Ebenezar Obadare:
- Alan Fowler:
- Bev Russell:
- Adam Habib:
- Driss Kettani: Research in Action as a means to Develop Capacities of Politicians and Decision Makers
- George Kabongah: Strengthening Democratic Governance through ICT: Post-Election Reconstruction in Kenya
- Christiana Atibil: Democratic governance and actors’ conceptualisation of the idea of civil society in Africa
- Ronelle Burger: How can we trust government to regulate fairly?
- Victor Adefemi: Imperial presidency in Nigeria
- Mouzayian Khalil: Peer Pressure: APRM and civil society in Nigeria
- James Muzondidya: Democratizing Democratisation: Democratizing rural spaces in transitional African states
- Jacob Mati: The power and limits of social movements…Kenya
- Priscilla Wamucii: Youth (in)security, governance and the public space in Kenya
- Leviticus Turner: Civil society, democratic consolidation and the culture of suspicion in sub-Saharan Africa
The Journal on Civil Society has agreed to publish four of the papers—by Ebenezer Obadare, Alan Fowler, Bev Russell and Adam Habib—along with an introduction by TrustAfrica. A second leading journal, VOLUNTAS, is considering a special issue on Africa, which would include the other papers supported by TrustAfrica.