African History

The African Union (AU) is a continental body consisting of the 55 member states that make up the countries of the African Continent. It was officially launched in 2002 as a successor to the Organization of African Unity

New constitutions are written every year. The people who write these important documents need to read and analyze texts from other places. And citizens need to know, and to be able to understand, what’s in their countries’ foundational documents. Constitute offers access to the world’s constitutions so that users can systematically compare them across a broad set of topics—using an inviting, clean interface.

The Library, Documentation and Information Department of the African Studies Centre Leiden (ASC) has compiled this web dossier to coincide with the conference ‘Elections in Africa: fair, façade or failure?’ held in The Hague on 25 November 2009. The conference is part of a joint programme entitled ‘The African State: façade and reality’, carried out by the ASC and the Africa Department of the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs (DAF). The dossier contains a selection of titles from the library's online catalogue, including monographs, articles, and chapters from edited works, published since 1990, when multiparty politics began to emerge in Africa. The country cases selected for the dossier correspond to the country-specific presentations at the conference. Each title in the dossier links directly to the corresponding record in the online catalogue, which provides a more detailed description of all titles as well as abstracts of many articles and edited works. The dossier starts with an introduction to elections in Africa by J. Abbink and concludes with a selection of links to relevant web sites.