Over the last two decades, the United Nations, the African Union and Regional Economic Communities have conducted various stabilisation interventions to establish secure environments during crises and advance stabilisation activities in different parts of Africa. However, while these organisations and other actors work to resolve crises, the progress made in addressing existing conflicts that threaten overall security is also at risk due to the impact of climate change in various regions of the continent. This has led to significant challenges for vulnerable local communities, particularly in the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin, as they face the effects of climate change –,such as floods, droughts and land degradation. This article explores the understanding and implementation of stabilisation and Climate, Peace and Security (CPS) across Africa. We find that there is a need to rethink how we tackle challenges such as climate, peace and security in African-led stabilisation contexts. We argue that existing models are inadequate for dealing with emerging challenges in stabilisation contexts, and provide fresh thinking on addressing African peace and security challenges from a holistic perspective. We propose a conceptual framework that integrates the rationale of stabilisation and CPS to address the emerging 21st-century CPS challenges in Africa. This proposal aims to enhance our understanding of how stakeholders can stabilise situations in the presence of climate change challenges, thereby better equipping communities and stakeholders to manage risks.

This article examines the NE 51/ series ‘matchbox’ houses in Dolam, a suburb of the township Katutura, in Windhoek, Namibia – structures originally built during the late 1950s and early 1960s as a part of the Apartheid government’s social engineering project to instil the values of ‘Western style’ Modernist living. Through a case study of three houses, the article explores how residents have redefined these colonial-era spaces. The study reveals that these homes, often owned and headed by women, have undergone significant renovations to accommodate multi-generational living. Moreover, the relationships between neighbouring households form a ‘configuration’ that transcends the physical boundaries of individual houses. The presence of a shared gate and the continuous exchange of resources and support illustrate how kinship networks extend beyond singular dwellings. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, this article contributes to broader discussions on the intersection of housing, kinship, and urban life in post-Apartheid Namibia. It challenges conventional understandings of township houses as isolated units, instead positioning them as interconnected spaces where social ties are actively maintained and reconfigured.

The paper examines the role of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (AKAA) in shaping the discourse and practice of modern architecture in Sub-Saharan Africa during its first three cycles (1980–1986). Through an in-depth analysis of nomination files, jury reports, and archival material, the study interrogates how the Award operated not merely as a mechanism of recognition but as a cultural apparatus embedded in postcolonial power relations. The central research question guiding this investigation asks: to what extent did the AKAA’s procedures and discursive strategies reinforce or contest the dependency structures inherited from colonialism? Findings indicate that, despite its declared ambition to celebrate diversity and local agency, the AKAA fostered an autoreferential network dominated by architects, critics, and institutions from the global North. Keywords such as tradition, identity, and hybridity recur in nomination statements and jury deliberations, functioning as ideological markers rather than instruments of critical evaluation. African actors, when acknowledged, appear either as romanticised vernacular builders or as elite professionals linked to political and economic power, leaving ordinary practitioners largely invisible. By mapping these dynamics, the paper contributes to a broader understanding of how architectural canons in postcolonial contexts are constructed through asymmetrical circulations of knowledge, expertise, and cultural capital. It calls for a reassessment of the AKAA’s historiographic legacy within the geopolitics of architectural modernity.

Can people wait patiently without hope? The question remains partially interrogated in the growing literature on the experience and politics of waiting and the character of social agency among the poor in the Global South. The paper interrogates this question, drawing on a detailed case study on residents’ subjective experiences of waiting for state provision of water service, in the context of a mounting water crisis in Makhanda, South Africa. The town of Makhanda has been experiencing frequent water cuts for several years. Our analysis of local narratives on the experience of time – waiting – among the poor in the margins of Makhanda demonstrates that patience may not always exist purely as a valorised virtue among social agents, nor does its existence rely on high levels of hope. Patience can be a collective disposition conjured up to cope with the painful experience of time – the burden of waiting – especially in contexts characterised by prolonged crisis and uncertainty. This form of patience, which we categorise as patience of necessity, is a compulsive form of patience produced by the inability of the urban poor to escape a water crisis and their limited access to resources of impatient waiting. Subsequently, the urban poor not only have to carry the social and physical burden of waiting, they are locked in a perpetual patience, acted upon as waiting. With diminished hope for immediate relief, this form of collective patience renders waiting possible, if not tolerable, in the context of prolonged uncertainty produced by constant water cuts.

In this paper, we define and give form to the nascent field of black planetary studies. We do this by charting a treatise on the conceptual coordinates of the field. At its base, it is the careful suturing of black studies, indigenous, environmental, and planetary studies in the service of breaching ontological boundaries. This redraws temporal parameters, recasts the human in relation to natural ecologies, and thinks across species in ways that attend to relation and coconstitutedness. As a response to the need to think beyond the limitations of the Anthropocene, we centre place, the interface between the human, waterbodies, spiritual and ancestral cosmologies, and plant and animal ecologies in our multispecies world. By refiguring the parameters of our classic – colonial – knowledge agendas, we open new ontological frontiers framed by a black worldview located on the African continent although insistently in relation to its black diasporas. Framed as black planetary, we attend differently from environmentalists, green activists, and scholars of subjectivity whose analysis often ends at the boundaries of the Anthropocene. Since place is central, we locate the field in its black geographies manifest in Africa and South Africa more specifically. Our intervention shifts the colonial order of things. We cast Africa as a site of theory.

This paper outlines the significance of recognising and understanding local responses to Covid-19 in specific contexts without subsuming them under global (North) experiences of the pandemic. Its focus is Uganda, where stringent government interventions slowed the spread of Covid-19, but also had severe adverse economic, social, and health impacts on those already marginalised, including Kampala’s youth living with or at risk of HIV/AIDS. The paper explores the potential of using creative arts practice to provide insights into these impacts and to capture the experiences of those affected. Following a brief outline of the current context of HIV/AIDS in Uganda and detailed account of the participatory creative practice methodology, the paper examines two themes emerging from the research: gender-based and economic violence during lockdowns, and difficulties of accessing medical treatment. The paper illustrates ways in which participatory creative practice enables discussion of the impacts of stigma, sharing knowledge about both diseases, and building mutual support to manage risks and impacts. The paper concludes that participatory creative practice provides important insights into local responses to Covid-19, can be a significant form of community self-help for those most at risk, and has potential to inform future responses in contexts where different pandemics collide.

The ambivalence of the junior rank Rwandan army deserter’s journey to exile is that it gives the army deserter a sense of freedom and heightened expectation of leading a safe and peaceful post military life beyond the reach of the military institution, while also marking the beginning of a myriad of physical, psychological, political, socio-economic and even embodied transitional realities for those forced into this state. Drawing from the narratives of thirty junior rank Rwandan army deserters living as exiles in South Africa, I argue that the journey to exile is a complex, fragmented and rhizomic movement from imminent danger towards presumed safety and freedom. Experiences of army deserters living in exile are usually understood from the vantage point of either their places of origin or the places where they would have settled. Their experiences of their journeys to exile remain under recognised.

In post-apartheid South Africa, ex-combatants remain stuck in their past combat identities. Despite the ‘stuckedness’ in their past-combat life, studies skirt around the idea of where and in which communities ex-combatants are reintegrating. A continuum of violence, in the context in which ex-combatants are reintegrating, has contributed to the ways in which communities expect ex-combatants to use violence to deal with violence. Drawing from Azania People’s Liberation Army (APLA) stories in South Africa, the reintegration of ex-combatants remains a mirage.

Drawing on an urban research experiment and collaboration, this paper explores the role of arts-based serious games in urban food security research. Serious Fun: Food for Thought developed out of a desire to explore creative ways of engaging food insecurity venturing beyond narrow developmentalist frames. Using arts-based research coupled with gaming principles, the purpose of the experiment was to engage different constituencies in an interactive way to unpack the food system in unequal societies, in this case, Cape Town. What the game enabled was a mirror, revealing the affective nuances of food systems in a real and almost immediate way that more traditional forms of research may be less able to do. In the paper, we propose four opportunities for enriching urban food research: First, we argue that research design is premised on knowledge and values researchers deem important. We believe that arts-based serious gaming offers alternative in-roads to engage with multiple everyday values, desires, perspectives and practices as a crucial process in re-arranging knowledge politics. Second, we suggest that traditional methods of knowledge production can be enriched by taking seriously affective forms of agency and tacit knowledge of urban residents and that this requires a revision of ethic-ing research. Third, we propose that where research is carried out matters and that Food for Thought enables a socio-spatial situation for grounded research. Finally, we argue that knowledge mobilisation is important and that arts-based serious games can offer spaces for surfacing, encountering and leveraging multiple knowledge. We propose that validating practical and affective knowledge of urban resident's own foodways can strengthen urban food systems research.

This article explores how a small-scale society in Nigeria mobilises cultural resources of personal naming practices to create awareness, promote environmental resilience and minimise the depletion of natural resources such as forests, farmlands, hunting grounds and fishing waters. Certain names are bestowed on children as intervention measures to ensure that human society operates within fringes of ecological borders in protecting and preserving nature. Drawing of the socio-onomastic theory that takes into account the social, cultural and situational domains in which names are given and used, this study aims to investigate how personal naming practices are used to expand environmental sustainability knowledge and increase understanding of historical processes of conserving nature and culture in a local community in Nigeria. Data for the study were collected through semi-structured interviews with 30 participants (N = 30) who were purposively sampled in Tivland, north-central Nigeria. The study concludes that naming practices form important fulcrum of traditional epistemology that foster a culture of sustainability that aims to improve the quality of all life forms as well as reveal varied concepts of identity, which are important to environmental concerns.