Politics and the Imagination

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Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400832136
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis Politics and the Imagination by : Raymond Geuss

Download or read book Politics and the Imagination written by Raymond Geuss and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-12-07 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In politics, utopians do not have a monopoly on imagination. Even the most conservative defenses of the status quo, Raymond Geuss argues, require imaginative acts of some kind. In this collection of recent essays, including his most overtly political writing yet, Geuss explores the role of imagination in politics, particularly how imaginative constructs interact with political reality. He uses decisions about the war in Iraq to explore the peculiar ways in which politicians can be deluded and citizens can misunderstand their leaders. He also examines critically what he sees as one of the most serious delusions of western political thinking--the idea that a human society is always best conceived as a closed system obeying fixed rules. And, in essays on Don Quixote, museums, Celan's poetry, Heidegger's brother Fritz, Richard Rorty, and bourgeois philosophy, Geuss reflects on how cultural artifacts can lead us to embrace or reject conventional assumptions about the world. While paying particular attention to the relative political roles played by rule-following, utilitarian calculations of interest, and aspirations to lead a collective life of a certain kind, Geuss discusses a wide range of related issues, including the distance critics need from their political systems, the extent to which history can enlighten politics, and the possibility of utopian thinking in a world in which action retains its urgency.

Rule Breaking and Political Imagination

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Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022647335X
Total Pages : 170 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (264 download)

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Book Synopsis Rule Breaking and Political Imagination by : Kenneth A. Shepsle

Download or read book Rule Breaking and Political Imagination written by Kenneth A. Shepsle and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-09-01 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Imagination may be thought of as a ‘work-around.’ It is a resourceful tactic to ‘undo’ a rule by creating a path around it without necessarily defying it. . . . Transgression, on the other hand, is rule breaking. There is no pretense of reinterpretation; it is defiance pure and simple. Whether imagination or disobedience is the source, constraints need not constrain, ties need not bind.” So writes Kenneth A. Shepsle in his introduction to Rule Breaking and Political Imagination. Institutions are thought to channel the choices of individual actors. But what about when they do not? Throughout history, leaders and politicians have used imagination and transgression to break with constraints upon their agency. Shepsle ranges from ancient Rome to the United States Senate, and from Lyndon B. Johnson to the British House of Commons. He also explores rule breaking in less formal contexts, such as vigilantism in the Old West and the CIA’s actions in the wake of 9/11. Entertaining and thought-provoking, Rule Breaking and Political Imagination will prompt a reassessment of the nature of institutions and remind us of the critical role of political mavericks.

Religion and the Political Imagination

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139493175
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (394 download)

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Book Synopsis Religion and the Political Imagination by : Ira Katznelson

Download or read book Religion and the Political Imagination written by Ira Katznelson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-07 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The theory of secularisation became a virtually unchallenged truth of twentieth-century social science. First sketched out by Enlightenment philosophers, then transformed into an irreversible global process by nineteenth-century thinkers, the theory was given substance by the precipitate drop in religious practice across Western Europe in the 1960s. However, the re-emergence of acute conflicts at the interface between religion and politics has confounded such assumptions. It is clear that these ideas must be rethought. Yet, as this distinguished, international team of scholars reveal, not everything contained in the idea of secularisation was false. Analyses of developments since 1500 reveal a wide spectrum of historical processes: partial secularisation in some spheres has been accompanied by sacralisation in others. Utilising new approaches derived from history, philosophy, politics and anthropology, the essays collected in Religion and the Political Imagination offer new ways of thinking about the urgency of religious issues in the contemporary world.

Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa

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Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 9780226114149
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (141 download)

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Book Synopsis Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa by : John L. Comaroff

Download or read book Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa written by John L. Comaroff and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this important new collection explore the diverse, unexpected, and controversial ways in which the idea of civil society has recently entered into populist politics and public debate throughout Africa. In a substantial introduction, anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff offer a critical theoretical analysis of the nature and deployment of the concept—and the current debates surrounding it. Building on this framework, the contributors investigate the "problem" of civil society across their regions of expertise, which cover the continent. Drawing creatively on one another's work, they examine the impact of colonial ideology, postcoloniality, and development practice on discourses of civility, the workings of everyday politics, the construction of new modes of selfhood, and the pursuit of moral community. Incisive and original, the book shows how struggles over civil society in Africa reveal much about larger historical forces in the post-Cold War era. It also makes a strong case for the contribution of historical anthropology to contemporary discourses on the rise of a "new world order."

Beckett's Political Imagination

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 110841799X
Total Pages : 279 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (84 download)

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Book Synopsis Beckett's Political Imagination by : Emilie Morin

Download or read book Beckett's Political Imagination written by Emilie Morin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-07 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beckett's Political Imagination uncovers Beckett's lifelong engagement with political thought and political history, showing how this concern informed his work as fiction author, dramatist, critic and translator. This radically new account will appeal to students, researchers and Beckett lovers alike.

The Politics of Imagination

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0415601541
Total Pages : 266 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (156 download)

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Book Synopsis The Politics of Imagination by : Chiara Bottici

Download or read book The Politics of Imagination written by Chiara Bottici and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-06-06 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Politics of Imagination offers a multidisciplinary perspective on the contemporary relationship between politics and the imagination. What role does our capacity to form images play in politics? And can we define politics as a struggle for people’s imagination? As a result of the increasingly central place of the media in our lives, the political role of imagination has undergone a massive quantitative and a qualitative change. As such, there has been a revival of interest in the concept of imagination, as the intimate connections between our capacity to form images and politics becomes more and more evident. Bringing together scholars from different disciplines and theoretical outlooks, The Politics of Imagination examines how the power of imagination reverberates in the various ambits of social and political life: in law, history, art, gender, economy, religion and the natural sciences. And it will be of considerable interest to those with contemporary interests in philosophy, political philosophy, political science, legal theory, gender studies, sociology, nationalism, identity studies, cultural studies, and media studies.

Collective Dreams

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Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271046120
Total Pages : 164 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis Collective Dreams by : Keally D. McBride

Download or read book Collective Dreams written by Keally D. McBride and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2007-08-09 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we go about imagining different and better worlds for ourselves? Collective Dreams looks at ideals of community, frequently embraced as the basis for reform across the political spectrum, as the predominant form of political imagination in America today. Examining how these ideals circulate without having much real impact on social change provides an opportunity to explore the difficulties of practicing critical theory in a capitalist society. Different chapters investigate how ideals of community intersect with conceptions of self and identity, family, the public sphere and civil society, and the state, situating community at the core of the most contested political and social arenas of our time. Ideals of community also influence how we evaluate, choose, and build the spaces in which we live, as the author’s investigations of Celebration, Florida, and of West Philadelphia show.Following in the tradition of Walter Benjamin, Keally McBride reveals how consumer culture affects our collective experience of community as well as our ability to imagine alternative political and social orders. Taking ideals of community as a case study, Collective Dreams also explores the structure and function of political imagination to answer the following questions: What do these oppositional ideals reveal about our current political and social experiences? How is the way we imagine alternative communities nonetheless influenced by capitalism, liberalism, and individualism? How can these ideals of community be used more effectively to create social change?

Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination

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Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780300076608
Total Pages : 196 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (766 download)

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Book Synopsis Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination by : Anthony Pagden

Download or read book Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination written by Anthony Pagden and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, Spain was regarded as a unique social and political community--the most exalted, the most feared, the most despised, and the most discussed since the Roman Empire. In this important book, Anthony Pagden offers an incisive analysis of the lasting influence of the Spanish Empire in the history of early modern Europe and of its place in the European and SpanishAmerican political imagination.

The Legend Of Napoleon

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Publisher : Granta Books
ISBN 13 : 1783781238
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (837 download)

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Book Synopsis The Legend Of Napoleon by : Sudhir Hazareesingh

Download or read book The Legend Of Napoleon written by Sudhir Hazareesingh and published by Granta Books. This book was released on 2014-07-03 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'God was bored with Napoleon,' wrote Victor Hugo, and the Emperor was duly defeated at Waterloo in 1815 and exiled to St Helena, where he died an agonizing and horrifying death. The Emperor's real legacy is the modernizing and beautifying of Paris, the official promotion of religious tolerance, the current French legal and educational systems, and the European Union, to name but a few Napoleonic initiatives. And of course, the legend lives on. Drawing on new archival research, Hazareesingh traces not only the emergence of the Napoleonic myth and how it developed into a potent political culture, but also the amazing tenacity of popular affection for the Emperor, manifest in countless busts and portraits in ordinary citizens' homes, grass-roots political activism, miraculous apparitions reported after his death and the memories kept alive by thousands of imperial war veterans. This book is a timely study of why the fascination with Napoleon has endured for two centuries.

Whose Bosnia?

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Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501701118
Total Pages : 286 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Whose Bosnia? by : Edin Hajdarpasic

Download or read book Whose Bosnia? written by Edin Hajdarpasic and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-30 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Edin Hajdarpasic shows, formative contestations over Bosnia and the surrounding region began well the assassination that triggered World War I, emerging with the rise of new nineteenth-century forces—Serbian and Croatian nationalisms, and Ottoman, Habsburg, Muslim, and Yugoslav political movements—that claimed this province as their own. Whose Bosnia? reveals the political pressures and moral arguments that made Bosnia a prime target of escalating nationalist activity. Hajdarpasic provides new insight into central themes of modern politics, illuminating core subjects like "the people," state-building, and national suffering. Whose Bosnia? proposes a new figure in the history of nationalism: the (br)other, a character signifying the potential of being "brother" and "Other," containing the fantasy of complete assimilation and insurmountable difference. By bringing this figure into focus, Whose Bosnia? shows nationalism to be a dynamic and open-ended force, one that eludes a clear sense of historical closure.

Political Violence and the Imagination

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000090639
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis Political Violence and the Imagination by : Mathias Thaler

Download or read book Political Violence and the Imagination written by Mathias Thaler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-10 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using a variety of theoretical reflections and empirically grounded case studies, this book examines how certain kinds of imagination – political, artistic, historical, philosophical – help us tackle the challenge of comprehending and responding to various forms of political violence. Understanding political violence is a complex task, which involves a variety of operations, from examining the social macro-structures within which actors engage in violence, to investigating the motives and drives of individual perpetrators. This book focuses on the faculty of imagination and its role in facilitating our normative and critical engagement with political violence. It interrogates how the imagination can help us deal with past as well as ongoing instances of political violence. Several questions, which have thus far received too little attention from political theorists, motivate this project: Can certain forms of imagination – artistic, historical, philosophical – help us tackle the challenge of comprehending and responding to unprecedented forms of violence? What is the ethical and political value of artworks depicting human rights violations in the aftermath of conflicts? What about the use of thought experiments in justifying policy measures with regard to violence? What forms of political imagination can foster solidarity and catalyse political action? This book opens up a forum for an inclusive and reflexive debate on the role that the imagination can play in unpacking complex issues of political violence. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of the journal, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.

A New Political Imagination

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000222284
Total Pages : 295 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis A New Political Imagination by : Tony Fry

Download or read book A New Political Imagination written by Tony Fry and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book presents the case for the making of a new political imagination by offering a critique of existing political institutions, philosophy and practices that are unable to provide the thinking, means and leadership to deal with the complexity and crises of specific locales and the world at large. The authors make clear that there is a fundamental disjuncture between the complexity of the combined critical conditions that are now putting life on Earth at risk, and the divisions and theories of knowledge that are dominantly and instrumentally trying to understand the situation. In response, this work makes the case for the need for a new political imagination that rejects the sufficiency of existing political ideologies (including democracy) being the end point of politics. The book tackles the political underpinnings of social and economic life in a world still embedded in the inequities of the afterlife of colonialism and state socialism. Thereafter it engages narratives of change, rethinks imagination and critical practices, to finally present a relationally connected way to move forward. This trans-disciplinary volume is directed at those working in political philosophy and epistemology, critical global and security studies, decoloniality and postcolonial studies, design, critical anthropology and the post humanities. It is accessible to both academic audiences and activists and practitioners.

States of Imagination

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Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822381273
Total Pages : 433 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

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Book Synopsis States of Imagination by : Thomas Blom Hansen

Download or read book States of Imagination written by Thomas Blom Hansen and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2001-12-12 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The state has recently been rediscovered as an object of inquiry by a broad range of scholars. Reflecting the new vitality of the field of political anthropology, States of Imagination draws together the best of this recent critical thinking to explore the postcolonial state. Contributors focus on a variety of locations from Guatemala, Pakistan, and Peru to India and Ecuador; they study what the state looks like to those seeing it from the vantage points of rural schools, police departments, small villages, and the inside of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Focusing on the micropolitics of everyday state-making, the contributors examine the mythologies, paradoxes, and inconsistencies of the state through ethnographies of diverse postcolonial practices. They show how the authority of the state is constantly challenged from the local as well as the global and how growing demands to confer rights and recognition to ever more citizens, organizations, and institutions reveal a persistent myth of the state as a source of social order and an embodiment of popular sovereignty. Demonstrating the indispensable value of ethnographic work on the practices and the symbols of the state, States of Imagination showcases a range of studies and methods to provide insight into the diverse forms of the postcolonial state as an arena of both political and cultural struggle. This collection will interest students and scholars of anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, political science, and history. Contributors. Lars Buur, Mitchell Dean, Akhil Gupta, Thomas Blom Hansen, Steffen Jensen, Aletta J. Norval, David Nugent, Sarah Radcliffe, Rachel Sieder, Finn Stepputat, Martijn van Beek, Oskar Verkaaik, Fiona Wilson

Imaginal Politics

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Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231527810
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis Imaginal Politics by : Chiara Bottici

Download or read book Imaginal Politics written by Chiara Bottici and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-13 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the radical, creative capacity of our imagination and the social imaginary we are immersed in is an intermediate space philosophers have termed the imaginal, populated by images or (re)presentations that are presences in themselves. Offering a new, systematic understanding of the imaginal and its nexus with the political, Chiara Bottici brings fresh perspective to the formation of political and power relationships and the paradox of a world rich in imagery yet seemingly devoid of imagination. Bottici begins by defining the difference between the imaginal and the imaginary, locating the imaginal's root meaning in the image and its ability to both characterize a public and establish a set of activities within that public. She identifies the imaginal's critical role in powering representative democracies and its amplification through globalization. She then addresses the troublesome increase in images now mediating politics and the transformation of politics into empty spectacle. The spectacularization of politics has led to its virtualization, Bottici observes, transforming images into processes with an uncertain relationship to reality, and, while new media has democratized the image in a global society of the spectacle, the cloned image no longer mediates politics but does the act for us. Bottici concludes with politics' current search for legitimacy through an invented ideal of tradition, a turn to religion, and the incorporation of human rights language.

Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139494880
Total Pages : 367 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (394 download)

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Book Synopsis Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination by : Theodore Koditschek

Download or read book Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination written by Theodore Koditschek and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-10 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the ways in which imperial agendas informed the writing of history in nineteenth-century Britain and how historical writing transformed imperial agendas. Using the published writings and personal papers of Walter Scott, J. A. Froude, James Mill, Rammohun Roy, T. B. Macaulay, E. A. Freeman, W. E. Gladstone, and J. R. Seeley among others, Theodore Koditschek sheds light on the role of the historical imagination in the establishment and legitimation of liberal imperialism. He shows how both imperialists and the imperialized were drawn to reflect back on the Empire's past as a result of the need to construct a modern, multi-national British imperial identity for a more economically expansive and enlightened present. By tracing the imperial lives and historical works of these pivotal figures, Theodore Koditschek illuminates the ways in which discourse altered practice, and vice versa, as well as how the history of Empire was continuously written and re-written.

The Politics of Dialogic Imagination

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Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022606073X
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (26 download)

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Book Synopsis The Politics of Dialogic Imagination by : Katsuya Hirano

Download or read book The Politics of Dialogic Imagination written by Katsuya Hirano and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-11-21 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Politics of Dialogic Imagination, Katsuya Hirano seeks to understand why, with its seemingly unrivaled power, the Tokugawa shogunate of early modern Japan tried so hard to regulate the ostensibly unimportant popular culture of Edo (present-day Tokyo)—including fashion, leisure activities, prints, and theater. He does so by examining the works of writers and artists who depicted and celebrated the culture of play and pleasure associated with Edo’s street entertainers, vagrants, actors, and prostitutes, whom Tokugawa authorities condemned to be detrimental to public mores, social order, and political economy. Hirano uncovers a logic of politics within Edo’s cultural works that was extremely potent in exposing contradictions between the formal structure of the Tokugawa world and its rapidly changing realities. He goes on to look at the effects of this logic, examining policies enacted during the next era—the Meiji period—that mark a drastic reconfiguration of power and a new politics toward ordinary people under modernizing Japan. Deftly navigating Japan’s history and culture, The Politics of Dialogic Imaginationprovides a sophisticated account of a country in the process of radical transformation—and of the intensely creative culture that came out of it.

Colonial Buganda and the End of Empire

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108417051
Total Pages : 301 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (84 download)

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Book Synopsis Colonial Buganda and the End of Empire by : Jonathon L. Earle

Download or read book Colonial Buganda and the End of Empire written by Jonathon L. Earle and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-24 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an intellectual history of colonial Buganda, using previously unseen archival material to recast the end of empire in East Africa. It will be ideal for researchers, upper-level undergraduate and graduate students interested in the cultural, intellectual, religious and political history of modern East Africa.