Daniel E. Agbiboa published a new book, They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption, and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria, with Oxford University Press.
Accounts of corruption in Africa and the Global South are generally overly simplistic and macro-oriented, and commonly disconnect everyday (petty) corruption from political (grand) corruption. In contrast to this tendency, They Eat Our Sweat offers a fresh and engaging look at the corruption complex in Africa through a micro analysis of its informal transport sector, where collusion between state and nonstate actors is most rife. Focusing on Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital and Africa's largest city, Daniel Agbiboa investigates the workaday world of road transport operators as refracted through the extortion racket and violence of transport unions acting in complicity with the state.
Learn more about the book here.
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Daniel E. Agbiboa is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He earned a PhD in International Development from the University of Oxford (St. Antony’s College) and an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge (Magdalene College). Before joining the Harvard faculty, he was Assistant Professor of Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House. Professor Agbiboa’s research and teaching straddles non-state governance, subversive mobilities, and the spatialization and materialization of corruption, power, and inequality in cities. He is the author of Transport, Transgression and Politics in African Cities: The Rhythm of Chaos (Routledge 2018), and of over 50 articles in leading journals, including Journal of Modern African Studies, African Affairs, Third World Quarterly, and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. A prior recipient of research awards from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the World Bank, the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the Nordic African Institute, Agbiboa currently serves on the ZED Africa Editorial Advisory Board for the series: Politics and Society in Urban Africa.