According to the Senegalese Press Agency, some forty academics from several countries have just published the book “Understanding Senegal and Africa Today”, edited by Ibou Diallo, Ibrahima Thioub, Alfred Inis Ndiaye and Ndiouga Benga.
The contributions collected in this book pay tribute to Momar-Coumba Diop, a Senegalese academic who, since the late 1980s, has directed and organised research that, through the relevance of its questions and the quality and originality of its results, has made it possible to draw up an inventory of contemporary Senegal”, reads a copy of the back cover of the book.
Momar-Coumba Diop, the academic to whom the authors pay tribute in this book, is a sociologist whose work focuses on religious brotherhoods, the State of Senegal and urban sociology.
The testimonies in the book ”offer innovative insights into the publications of this academic who conceived, set up and managed the Research Centre for Social Policies (Crepos)”, an organisation dedicated to research and based in Dakar.
This book also contains contributions that cross-reference or complement the work of Momar-Coumba Diop. This can be seen in the articles on the State, on political and religious figures in Africa, on ethnicity in democratic transitions, and on the important issue of Casamance”, states the document received from one of the authors.
Understanding Senegal and Africa Today. A collection of essays dedicated to Momar-Coumba Diop” also includes texts on a number of themes: the State in Africa, crises in Central Africa, the ”challenges” of digital sovereignty for Africa, ”Casamance in the process of decolonisation in Senegal”, ”Casamance and the moral topography of the Senegalese State”, as well as a text dedicated to Atou Diagne, ”a leading figure in urban Mouridism”, now deceased.