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Can African youth be a sustainable resource for peace? Under which requirements can such a project be achieved? This questioning introduces the concern of this article which examines the current burgeoning of African youth from conceptual and qualitative perspectives. Thanks to the awakening of critical voices of African civil society, African youth are more than ever active in the political arena. They contributed, for example, to the fall of the Compaoré regime in October 2014. They closely follow the evolution of democracy in Senegal and create anxiety for the Congolese (DRC) over the mandate regime. Their commitment can be viewed as a search for peace as social cohesion. The paper explores two case studies: the Balai citoyen and Filimbi. It affirms that these youth platforms deal with issues that are intertwined between local challenges, global interactions and transnational conflicts. They can be viewed as peace builders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though language and oral tradition have long been appreciated among the indigenous people of Africa as the vehicle of knowledge and central to societal development, social scientists and even sociologists have not utilized these sufficiently in undertaking their researches. Knowledge and theories are mainstreamed and applied relative to Africa without significant appreciation of elements of knowledge that could positively impact theories and methodologies most relevant to and from those societies. This is in spite of recognitions of contextual content of ‘everyday sociology’ as necessary for ‘verstehen(ing)’. This challenge also interface with policy papers on the continent. Many policies on the continent fail because their knowledge base is not localized through appropriately indigenous knowledge, thereby leading to failure. This article attempts to show how the incorporation of indigenous knowledge structures into sociology and development policies can assist in development of Africana sociology that will be useful for both theory and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building upon the works of Karl Marx, Max Weber, Alexis de Tocqueville and Michel Foucault, this article develops a concept of power that bridges the structure-agency, control-benefit and macro-micro divides in sociology. Using Sierra Leone as a case study, the article identifies three forms of power that are manifested in political, economic, and everyday life situations. It traces political and economic power to the struggles for control over the government and the economic exploitation of the state by the elite. It argues that the forms of political and economic power that emerged in Sierra Leone led to state decay, which created conditions for the civil war. Furthermore, it examines the micro manifestation of power by combatants and ordinary people during the civil war. The article contributes to the theoretical discourse on power in sociology by bringing in an African political experience, which is often missing in sociological theory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]