The discipline of international relations has never paid much attention to Africa. The continent has rarely been home to Great Powers, and has long since ceased to be a centre of capitalist accumulation. As a result, its international politics has often been portrayed as simply a reflection of superpower rivalry or external economic agendas. This course was created to challenge this understanding. We will ask you how far international relations theory can account for the various ways in which African political actors have been able to challenge and/or subvert international agendas. The goal is to improve your understanding of African international politics, and to stimulate thinking about how international relations theories might need to be modified to accommodate this understanding.
After beginning with an overview with these debates, the course turns to the creation of African states during the colonial era. (Some scholars argue that even these processes were deeply shaped by African agency!) Then, in Part II, we turn to the period of decolonisation and the Cold War. This was a period when African states developed a very assertive set of political programmes as part of the Third World bloc. In Part III this assertiveness will be contrasted with the period that immediately followed the end of the Cold War, which saw an apparent convergence around an internationally-ascendant liberal political agenda. We then finish, in Part IV, with an analysis of the last two decades. We will ask if the rise of emerging powers, new oil discoveries, and the 'war on terror' have combined to give African states back the policy space they once had during the Cold War, and ask whether this has indeed led to the re-emergence of a nationalist and 'post-Western' African order.
Peter Brett
