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15 Preface and acknowledgements Writing this dissertation has been a long and winding journey between important activities like raising a family and less important things like building up the Centre for Africa Studies, at Göteborg University, building up and running internationalisation programmes like the capacity building programme with the Centre for Conflict Management at the National University of Rwanda, doing a number of other research undertakings in Rwanda and Tanzania, and comprehensive teaching. Like all narratives this one has a long pre-history. Once upon a time I thought I should become an agronomist. Being active in the Africa Groups and the “greenmovement ”, my interest arose from the debate on the disadvantages of the “green revolution ”. I wanted to develop food crops with high protein and calorie yields without fertilisers in an organic production system that could maintain soil fertility. In 1979/80 I went to Africa with the ambition—besides experiencing the “great adventure”—to study agricultural projects. I travelled cross-country the whole way from what was then Salisbury to Göteborg. This trip took almost a year to complete and made me deeply interested in Africa. It also forced me to pass through three civil wars: the just concluded liberalisation war in Zimbabwe and the ongoing wars in Uganda and Sudan, as that was the only way to go by land back to Sweden. Being stuck in Uganda and Southern Sudan for several months, seeing the destructiveness of war in all its horrifying aspects, illustrated in a disquieting way the war-experiences I had been told of by my Germanborn father and his parents during my childhood. My father’s and my grandparents’ grim experiences of two world wars have had a much larger impact on me than I had realised. This together with the hands-on experience of the destructiveness of war in poor countries later on brought me to the department for Peace and Development Research. Without peace little development will take place, and without development there is a risk that conflicts will escalate into war. Africa has since that trip been a part of my life. I became fascinated by the vibrant culture at all levels of the different societies. The warm, kind atmosphere and the ever present joke and big laugh were and are intriguing. I became so enchanted with the culture that I could not resist sharing some of its qualities through playing East African dance music myself. Almost ten years of playing the saxophone with Mama Malumma, including two tours in Tanzania, gave an inroad into another Tanzania than the gloomy macro-economic indicators suggested. In 1989 I was given the opportunity to do a minor field study in Tanzania and have since then returned to East Africa almost every year in different capacities. My licentiate thesis focused on the economic impact of the structural adjustment programmes on the local level in Tanzania and was 16 based on extensive fieldwork in Geita and Arumeru districts. It was presented in 1997. However, after being part of a team studying the Swedish support to peace-monitoring in the most violence-prone areas in South Africa in connection with the elections of 1994, together with Håkan Thörn, I became more interested in democratisation and peace-building issues. I had the opportunity to follow the first steps towards multiparty democracy in Tanzania and the elections in 1995, which made me start on a new PhD thesis subject rather than continue with the licentiate thesis. This text has been written now and then over a long period, using small units of time split up by teaching-duties, course-development and institutionbuilding. And there were a number of detours with various studies on Tanzania and Rwanda. The most relevant one for this work was the participation in a team coordinated by David Booth from ODI to evaluate the Swedish country assistance programme to Tanzania for the years 1995 to 2000, where my part was to focus on the support to democratisation and culture together with the late Professor Andrew Kiondo from the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM). This gave invaluable input and networks that have bene fited the work of thesis, at the national level. Another study that supplemented my work on this thesis, was an interdisciplinary three year programme to study the effects of the introduction of cost-sharing on children’s rights to health and education, the first larger project coordinated by the Centre for Africa...

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