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ralence.bsky.social
Politics and political economy of Africa, based at Wits University in Johannesburg.
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US President Trump said Lesotho was a country “nobody has heard of”. Africans, ever generous in spirit, have offered him help. The “Trump Golf”shirt used by Trump at his many his many courses, branded by Greg Norman, is made in Lesotho.

submitted 22 hours ago • 2 comments

Electoral democracies in Africa have better records of socially inclusive and economically sustainable development than their non-democratic counterparts in the three decades since the end of the Cold War: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... (open access)

submitted 22 hours ago • 1 comment

US politics seems disoriented by a new "$100 bill on the sidewalk" paradox: if it's really possible for presidents to do whatever they want whenever they want, why has it never happened before?

submitted 20 days ago • 0 comments

Archive Request xkcd.com/3052

submitted 20 days ago • 124 comments

I was feeling unfulfilled by studies of Africa's intraregional trade where the punch line is a coefficient for a dummy variable in a gravity model. So I made this Dorling cartogram of 2022 trade flows. Countries are circles proportional to GDP, with recorded trade flows overlaid.

submitted 79 days ago • 1 comment