Winner of the 2024 ASAUK Best Thesis Award

The ASAUK congratulates the winner of this year’s Best Thesis Award, Innocent Batsani-Ncube, for the thesis ‘Made by China’: the politics and implications of Chinese government funded & constructed Parliament buildings in Lesotho, Malawi and Zimbabwe. The thesis was completed at SOAS, University of London.

Abstract

This PhD thesis maps the political controversies in the making, using and contesting of three Parliament buildings in Africa that were financed and constructed by the People’s Republic of China. In the past two decades China has directly taken charge of the construction, refurbishment and maintenance of parliamentary built environments in fifteen African countries. The financing of African parliament buildings by China provides a solid event around which to frame questions about new developments in China-Africa relations, the evolution of African parliaments and policy relevant debates on contemporary representative politics in Africa. The main research question of this PhD thesis reads as follows: How and why is China donating parliaments to African countries and how do these buildings impact the symbolic and substantive things that parliaments do or ought to do? Drawing on eight months of mixed-methods fieldwork in Malawi, Lesotho and Zimbabwe, and leveraging Albena Yaneva’s mapping controversy in architecture as the analytic framework, I trace the interactions between the Chinese and African state ruling elites, the manifestation of the projects and citizen perceptions towards the parliament buildings. I also explore the layered agency of Chinese construction companies, African bureaucrats and local labour.

Two key findings flow from my research. First, it is evident that the investment in parliament buildings fulfils one of China’s main foreign policy goals of sustaining long term political influence in Africa. This is because financing and maintaining the parliament buildings enables China to hedge political influence through continued direct access to dominant cross-party political elites in each receiving country. This research thus spotlights how China, as a rising global power, delivers its political aid and secures political influence in the domestic politics of beneficiary states. However, the story is also more nuanced and somewhat counterintuitive in its implications for those domestic polities, which brings me to my second finding: the way in which the construction of the parliament buildings has enhanced the profile of the institution of parliament in the respective countries, amplified its sociopolitical significance and entrenched the technology of participatory representative politics. This thesis thus contributes to broader debates on China-Africa relations and the ways these are impacting the development of domestic political institutions in Africa.

The finalists for the ASAUK2024 Best Thesis Award:

The ASAUK congratulates the short-listed candidates and we look forward to welcoming them at the conference.

Here are the names of the finalists, in alphabetical order. The university named is where the thesis was completed:

Innocent Batsani-Ncube (SOAS) ‘Made by China’: the politics and implications of Chinese government funded & constructed Parliament buildings in Lesotho, Malawi and Zimbabwe.

Xianan Jin (SOAS) The Political Economy of Women’s Political Participation in Rwanda: Gender, Class, and State-building

Julia Modern (Cambridge)  ‘You are all my people’ Building disabled community in Uganda’s microentrepreneur economy

Jacob Obodai (Open University) The Impacts of Small-Scale Gold Mining on Food Security in Ghana

The African Studies Association of the UK awards a prize for the best doctoral thesis in African Studies which has been successfully examined in a UK institution of higher education during the two calendar years immediately preceding the next ASAUK Conference.

The prize is an early mark of esteem for graduate work and is accompanied by a certificate and an attractive package of book and journal vouchers generously provided by our publisher donors.

The prize was inaugurated in 1993, and from 1996 to 2023 was named the Audrey Richards Prize for African Studies. Dr Audrey Richards, CBE (1899–1984) was a pioneering British social anthropologist who worked mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, notably Zambia, South Africa and Uganda. She held lectureships and directorships at LSE, Witwatersrand, Makerere, and Cambridge. She was the Second President of ASAUK. In 2023, ASAUK Council made a decision to name all our prizes simply as ASAUK prizes, and to the prize is again called the ASAUK Dissertation Prize from now on.

The cut-off is for any dissertation successfully defended or awarded between 1 January 2022 and 31 December 2023. Deadline for the submission of nominations was 20 April 2024.

In the past, nominations had to consist of a short letter of nomination from the supervisor or external examiner, accompanied by the internal and external examiner’s reports. For this cohort, that will not be a requirement.

Nominations were emailed to Dr Louisa Egbunike, Vice-President of ASAUK (please include ‘ASAUK Best Thesis Prize’ in the subject line). The thesis was emailed as a pdf document along with the examiners’ reports to louisa.egbunike@durham.ac.uk.

Please make sure you have checked all the following:

1. The thesis must have been completed at a UK university
2. The thesis must have been successfully defended or awarded between 1 January 2022 and 31 December 2023
3. Thesis and any optional supporting documents should be sent as pdf files, not word files.

Nominations for the next award cycle will open in 2026.