Development from below: A Namibian case study

Abstract

"Rebuilding societies from below: perspectives from Southern Africa" was the subject of a Research Forum organised by the Nordic Africa Institute in collaboration with the Seminar for Development Studies of Uppsala University. Thanks to generous financial support by the Wenner-Gen Foundation, which is herewith gratefully acknowledge, we were able to invite a prominent scholar to present the main lecture at this event. He was joined by two local discussants. Part of the intended debate focused on the tricky question of conceptualising society and its (local, national or super-national) boundaries, present day post-colonial societies, understood as being involved in a process of ongoing co-evaluation with the dominant capitalist countries, have to take into account the difficulties resulting from this context. At the same time, they have consider internal trajectories and constraints. The rather theoretical reflections were exemplified by research findings from Southern Namibia: the...