Africa International Relations-AA2017 | Advance reading | Đại học Khoa học Xã hội và Nhân văn, Đại học Quốc gia Thành phố HCM
In the course "Africa International Relations-AA2017" at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City, students explore the complex dynamics of Africa's interactions with the global community. This advanced reading course delves into the historical, political, economic, and cultural dimensions of Africa's international relations. From colonial legacies to contemporary issues such as development aid, trade, conflict resolution, and regional integration, students analyze Africa's position in the international system. By examining diverse perspectives and case studies, students gain a comprehensive understanding of Africa's role in shaping and responding to global challenges and opportunities.
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lOMoAR cPSD| 40799667
Africa International Relations-AA2017
Advanced reading (Đại học Khoa học Xã hội và Nhân văn, Đại học Quốc gia Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh) lOMoAR cPSD| 40799667
African Affairs, 116/462, 125–139 doi: 10.1093/afraf/adw071
© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal African Society. All rights reserved
Advance Access Publication 8 December 2016 RESEARCH NOTE
AFRICA AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: ASSEMBLING AFRICA, STUDYING THE WORLD RITA ABRAHAMSEN* ABSTRACT
This Research Note contributes to recent debates about Africa’s place
within the discipline of International Relations (IR). It argues that bring-ing
Africa into IR cannot be simply a question of ‘add Africa and stir’, as the
continent does not enter the discipline as a neutral object of study. Instead,
it is already overdetermined and embedded within the politics and structure
of values of the academe, which are in turn influenced in complex ways by
changing geopolitics. The present combination of IR’s increased awareness
of its own Western-centrism and Africa’s position as the new ‘frontline in the
war on terror’ therefore harbours both opportun-ities and dangers, and
bringing Africa into IR involves epistemological and methodological
challenges relating to our object of study and political chal-lenges relating to
the contemporary securitization of Africa. The Research Note suggests that
an assemblage approach offers a productive way of nego-tiating this
encounter between IR and African Studies, making it possible to study
Africa simultaneously as a place in the world and of the world, captur-ing
the continent’s politics and societies as both unique and global.
FROM MIGRATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE and financial expansion, Africa is at
the centre of numerous international crises and opportunities. Yet the
study of Africa stands in an ambivalent and tension-filled relationship to
the discipline of International Relations (IR). While IR claims to study
‘the international’, scholars of Africa routinely accuse the discipline of
sins of omission and misapprehension: IR, they charge, is preoccupied
with great power politics, devoted to understanding the states ‘that make
the most difference’.1 Hence, it mostly ignores and marginalizes Africa,
*Rita Abrahamsen (rita.abrahamsen@uottawa.ca) is professor in the Graduate School of
Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. This Research Note was first
presented at the conference New Political Topographies at the Centre of African Studies
at the University of Edinburgh, and I am grateful to the participants for their comments.
Thanks are also due to Michael C. Williams and Adam Sandor. 1.
Kenneth Waltz, Theory of international politics (Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1979), p. 73. 125 lOMoAR cPSD| 40799667 126 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
and when the continent makes an occasional IR appearance its treatment is
readily dismissed by Africanists as superficial, erroneous, or Western-
centric.2 From this perspective, IR is a profoundly Western discipline,
unable to capture the historical specificity of the postcolonial African state,
to perceive of difference as anything but deviance from a norm, and there-
fore also unable to capture the continent’s globality. Africa, then, is IR’s
permanent ‘other’, serving to reproduce and confirm the superiority and
hegemony of Western knowledge, epistemologies, and methodologies.
There is much truth to this critique and four decades on Stanley
Hoffman’s 1977 description of IR as ‘an American social science’ remains
a reasonably fair depiction.3 IR is rarely told from the ‘periphery’ and IR
theorizing remains steeped in theories ‘made in the USA’.4 At the same
time, much has changed and like most of the social sciences, IR is becom-
ing more self-reflexive and aware of its parochialism and shortcomings.5
Similarly, African Studies is showing an increasing engagement and rap-
prochement with IR.6 On both sides, there are thus growing efforts at dia-
logue and mutual learning, with ambitions to ‘bring Africa in from the
margins’, to demonstrate the ‘lessons’ IR can learn from Africa and to
include more southern voices in IR.7
This Research Note seeks to contribute to the debate about Africa’s place
within IR but argues that it is not sufficient simply to ‘bring Africa in’ or to
demonstrate the inadequacy or failure of IR theory to capture African real-
ities. While the former approach serves the valuable function of adding a
series of African cases or illustrations to IR, and thus expands our empirical
2. For instructive examples, see Kevin C. Dunn and Timothy M. Shaw (eds), Africa’s
chal-lenge to International Relations theory (Palgrave, London, 2001); Scarlett
Cornelissen, Fantu Cheru and Timothy M. Shaw (eds), Africa and International
Relations in the 21st century (Palgrave, London, 2012); Branwen Gruffydd Jones (ed.),
Decolonizing International Relations (Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 2006).
3. Stanley Hoffman, ‘An American social science: International Relations’, Daedalus 106,1 (1977), pp. 41–60.
4. Ole Wæver and Arlene B. Ticker, ‘Introduction: geocultural epistemologies’, in Arlene
B. Tickner and Ole Waever (eds), International Relations scholarship around the
world (Routledge, London, 2009), p. 1.
5. See Tickner and Wæver, ‘Introduction’; Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney,
International Relations and the problem of difference (Routledge, London, 2004);
Didier Bigo and R.B.J. Walker, ‘Political sociology and the problem of the international’,
Millennium 35, 3 (2007), pp. 725–739. 6.
See Carl Death, ‘Governmentality at the limits of the international: African politics and
Foucauldian theory’, Review of International Studies 39, 3, (2013), pp. 763–787; Sophie
Harman and William Brown, ‘In from the margins? The changing place of Africa in International
Relations’, International Affairs 89, 1 (2013), pp. 69–87; African Affairs, ‘Virtual Issue: Africa’s International Relations’,
international_relations_vi.html> (15 June 2016).
7. Harman and Brown speak of ‘bringing Africa in from the margins’. Lemke identifies
‘African lessons for IR’, and a similar sentiment is expressed in Cornelissen, Cheru, and
Shaw. Harman and Brown, ‘In from the margins?’; Douglas Lemke, ‘African lessons for
International Relations research’, World Politics 56, 1 (2003), pp. 114–38; Cornelissen,
Cheru and Shaw, Africa and International Relations. lOMoAR cPSD| 40799667
AFRICA AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 127
knowledge and horizons, it does not fundamentally change or challenge
deeper assumptions of what constitutes ‘the international’ or theories of
the international. By the same token, while the latter approach of
revealing IR’s Western-centrism and adopting an African perspective on
the international sends a pointed political message about the empire’s
ability to ‘write back’,8 this merely replaces one parochialism with
another. An African IR would be just another provincial IR, a substitute
or evil twin of a Western IR, and would do little to facilitate the
development of theoretical concepts and fra-meworks that allow us to
theorize the international or the global—wherever it may be located.
The question of Africa’s place within IR is not then simply a question of
‘add Africa and stir’. Instead, the question goes to the heart of what it means
to study ‘Africa’ and ‘the international’ and involves complex epis-
temological and methodological issues. It also involves an engagement with
the politics of the academe, our own disciplinary forms of symbolic capital,
as well as their interaction with broader geopolitics. This Research Note
outlines some of these challenges and suggests that an engagement with
international political sociology, and more specifically an assemblage
methodology, offers a productive way of negotiating the meeting between IR
and African Studies by making it possible to study Africa simultan-eously as
a place in the world and of the world, i.e. in a manner that appreciates its
specificity and its globality. By studying Africa from the ground up, as it is
being constantly assembled by a multiplicity of local and global forces, the
continent’s politics and societies can be captured as both unique and global,
as a window on the contemporary world and its articulation in particular settings.
Africa, the disciplines, and international politics
We cannot understand our objects of study (be they ‘Africa’ or ‘the inter-
national’) outside an appreciation of the disciplines that constituted them
as such, and by implication the question of Africa’s position within IR
requires an engagement with the sociology of the two disciplines, the
his-torically constituted practices that they seek to examine and the relation-ship between them.
African Studies has arguably always suffered from an inferiority com-
plex,9 and debates about Africa and IR is but one articulation of a long
series of soul-searching exercises of African Studies’ relationship to the 8.
The phrase is borrowed from Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds) The empire
writes back: Theory and practice in post-colonial literature (Routledge, London, 1989).
9. The same could possibly be said for IR. See Tim Dunne, Lene Hansen and Colin
Wight ‘The end of International Relations theory?’ European Journal of International
Relations 19, 3 (2013), pp. 405–425. lOMoAR cPSD| 40799667 128 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
broader academe. There are few better illustrations of this than the vol-ume
Africa and the disciplines, edited by Robert Bates, V.Y. Mudimbe and
Jean O’Barr.10 The book is billed as a ‘defense for the study of Africa’ and
includes chapters on Africanists’ contributions to a range of disciplines,
including politics, economics, philosophy, and literary studies. In the open-
ing paragraphs the editors narrate an imaginary job interview at a leading
American university. The provost, dean, or departmental chair is interview-
ing a candidate who has conducted the bulk of her research in Africa. She is
asked the question ‘Given that resources are scarce and that I’m trying to
build a top-ranked department, why should I invest in someone who works
on Africa? And ‘What has been the contribution of research in Africa to this
discipline?’ As the editors put it, disciplines reside within departments,
departments dominate universities and the questions thus cut to the core of
the standing of African Studies within the modern university.
Bates, Mudimbe, and O’Barr’s rebuttal is that African Studies has con-
tributed to the disciplines. Their point is fair enough, but the defence
itself acknowledges that Africa is brought to the disciplines and that
those disciplines themselves emerge from elsewhere. African Studies
and Africanists stand on the sidelines; as experts on Africa rather than
IR, pol-itics, or economics, they watch the disciplines go by, making the
occa-sional, if sometimes significant, contribution from the fringes.
This positioning and self-perception of African Studies within the aca-
deme reflect academic politics and the hierarchies of the academic field.
Theory almost always has a higher symbolic capital than the empirical, and
theory building and the production of nomothetic, generalizable insights
command attention and respect within the social sciences, much more so
than empirical approaches centred on idiographic case studies and thick
description characterized as ‘il ustrations’ and ‘application of theory’.11 This
structure of value is one important reason why African Studies tend to
occupy the lower echelons of the ivory towers. Conversely, it also helps
explain why Africanists are prone to dismiss generality in favour of specifi-
city as a way on enhancing their own symbolic capital and status. Africanists
pride themselves on their intimate knowledge of place, trading and compar-
ing stories of ‘time spent in the field’. Country expertise is the researcher’s
official insignia, with regional knowledge of East, West, North, or Southern
10. Robert H. Bates, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Jean F. O’Barr, Africa and the disciplines:
The contributions of research in Africa to the social sciences and the humanities
(University of Chicago Press, Chicago Ill., 1993). 11.
Jack S. Levy, ‘Explaining events and developing theories: History, Political Science, and
the analysis of International Relations’, in Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman (eds),
Bridges and boundaries: Historians, political scientists and the study of International
Relations (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001); David Szanton (ed.), The politics of knowl-edge.
Area Studies and the disciplines (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2004); Dunne,
Hansen and Wight, ‘The end of International Relations theory?’ lOMoAR cPSD| 40799667
AFRICA AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 129
Africa a possible additional badge of honour. Even as globalization has
destabilized the notion of place as a bounded geographical construct
and the location of African politics has been de-territorialized and
stretched across national borders,12 the Africanist and knowledge about
Africa remain tied to space and symbolic capital arises in large part from
country expertise rather than theory production.
The vexed relationship between IR and African Studies arises in part from
their different forms of symbolic capital, with representatives of both
defending the forms of knowledge that most enhances their own (academic)
status. In this way, the fields are likely to reproduce themselves; to succeed
in either requires new recruits to acquire the requisite forms of symbolic
capital, be it theoretical innovation or field experience.13 The challenge for
African Studies is that its valorization of the idiographic, or the specific, often
phrased in quasi-antagonistic opposition to the general and nomo-thetic IR,
simultaneously reproduces Africanists as just that: experts on Africa and
their specific country rather than on IR, the international or an issue area. In
so doing, Africanists risk ceding the ground, to let others speak with
authority on ‘international affairs’ in Africa, thus also relinquish-ing the
opportunity to share their knowledge, to speak to the discipline of IR and
about the world at large. In this way, Africa’s specificity and exoti-cism is
reproduced and reconfirmed. As an object of study the continent becomes a
place apart, a place for the application of theories, or a source of raw data,
but not a site for the generation of ideas and theoretical insights that have
widespread and general relevance for the world.
The status of African Studies within IR (and the academe more gener-
ally) also has to be understood in the context of the continent’s relative
position of weakness within the international system, and the real and per-
ceived status of Africa within the academe has waxed and waned in cor-
respondence with the continent’s perceived geopolitical importance. Indeed,
the very emergence of African Studies is closely linked to geopol-itics, as
the processes of decolonization gave birth to a spate of new coun-tries
precisely at the time of simmering cold war tensions.14 The various Area
Studies were thus forged in the midst of the bipolar struggle for allies and
influence in newly independent states, and while left-leaning
12. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy’, Theory,
Culture & Society 7 (1990), pp. 295–310; Charles Piot, Remotely global: Village
modernity in West Africa (University of Chicago Press, Chicago Ill., 1999).
13. For a discussion of fieldwork as a form of evidence, see Christopher Cramer,
Deborah Johnston, Charles Oya and John Sender, ‘Research note: Mistakes, crises and
research inde-pendence: The perils of fieldwork as a form of evidence’, African Affairs
116, 458 (2016), pp. 148–160. 14.
For an in-depth analysis of the development of African Studies, see Paul T. Zezela, The study of
Africa (Volume 1): Disciplinary and interdisciplinary encounters (Codesria, Dakar, 2006) and The
study of Africa (Volume 2): Transnational and global engagements (Codesria, Dakar, 2007). On
the emergence of Area Studies, see Szanton, The politics of knowledge. lOMoAR cPSD| 40799667 130 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
Africanists sought to promote self-determination and anti-imperialism,
the mainstream of African Studies (and Area Studies more generally)
was closely aligned with the ‘realpolitik’ of the cold war era. Put
differently, at its inception the dominant scholarship and research
agendas of African Studies mapped readily on to the geopolitical
concerns of the West.15 This is evident not only in those studies that
aligned most crudely with Western foreign policy objectives but also
more broadly in the numerous analyses of political change and
modernization with their underlying fear that social transformations
might spark more radical, socialist demands, or even revolutions.16
In large part because of this political alignment, Area Studies fell out of
favour as bipolarity came to an end. In its wake, International Studies or
Global Studies were born, and influential funding bodies like the Social
Science Research Council (SSRC) in the US abolished Area Studies com-
mittees in 1996, withdrew funding and instead launched new initiatives on
cross-regional and globalization issues.17 While African Studies clearly did
not disappear or metamorphose into Global Studies, the new geopol-itical
landscape changed the perceived relevance of African Studies within the
policy world and within the academe.
Then came September 11, 2001, and ‘place’ reasserted its importance.
Almost overnight African Studies, along with the other Area Studies, were
back in fashion, but this time in a different relationship to geopolitics.
Whether as political scientist, anthropologist, or linguist, the country expert’s
intimate knowledge of place is now valued for its potential contributions to
global security, stabilization, and strategies of counter-terrorism. Funding
from research councils, private foundations, and government ministries is
again flowing freely, often to projects with a direct focus on security—be it
failed states, radicalization, or the effectiveness of security sector reform.
This is why the answer to the question of Africa’s position within IR
cannot simply be ‘add Africa and stir’. Geopolitics has an impact on the
structure of values within the academe, and contemporary incentives and
pressures from governments and funding councils for policy relevance
contribute towards making Africa a more attractive focus of research within
IR. This does not fundamentally alter the relative value of the nomothetic
and the idiographic, but combined with IR’s increased aware-ness of its own
parochialism it recalibrates their relationship within the symbolic politics of
the academe. Importantly then, Africa does not enter
15. Paul T. Zeleza, ‘African Studies and universities since independence’, Transition 101 (2009), pp. 110–135.
16. See Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the future: Modernization theory in cold war
America (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 2004).
17. Zeleza, ‘African Studies’. lOMoAR cPSD| 40799667
AFRICA AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 131
the discipline of IR as a neutral object of study but is instead already
over-determined and embedded in diverse struggles.
The current question of Africa and IR thus brings both challenges and
opportunities. Politically, Africa’s popularity raises the spectre of an African
Studies yet again subservient to the interests and requirements of the
powerful, of knowledge produced, utilized, and mobilized in the service of
dominant states. Significant concerns have already been raised that the US
Department of Defense’s Minerva Funds and other military-sponsored
research is skewing knowledge about the continent towards US security
interests.18 As such, the heightened geopolitical importance of the continent
involves scholars in complex balancing acts, weighing the desire and obliga-
tion towards policy relevance and impact against the dangers of cooptation,
the loss of an independent, critical voice, and the risk of yet again becoming
building blocks in wider geopolitical and intellectual agendas.
Epistemologically and methodologically, however, the current situation
is rife with opportunities to bring Africa into IR, not as an exception or a
mere illustration but as an articulation of the global. The combination of
Africa’s centrality to international security and IR’s sensitivity to its dis-
ciplinary parochialism might—if carefully negotiated—provide the condi-
tions of possibility for escaping what Paulin Hountondji has described as
Africa’s theoretical and intellectual ‘extraversion’, i.e. the tendency to
treat the continent as a place for the application of theories developed in
the North or as merely a source of data rather than a site whence we
can generate broader ideas and theoretical insights.19
Africa’s current security predicament illustrates with particular clarity how the
continent’s politics is simultaneously global politics. Understanding Africa’s
insecurity certainly requires specific knowledge and country expert-ise, but these
issues are also at the heart of the most pressing contemporary global
challenges regarding peace, democracy, freedom, tolerance, and so on. They
are, in different words, disciplinary concerns, and as such can be seen as an
invitation to Africanists to break free of strict geographical
18. William G. Martin and Brendan Innis McQuade, ‘Militarising—and marginalising?—
African Studies USA’, Review of African Political Economy 41,141 (2014), pp. 441–457;
Hugh Gusterson, ‘Project Minerva and the militarization of anthropology’, Radical Teacher 86 (2009), pp. 4–16. 19.
Paulin J. Hountondji, The struggle for meaning: Reflections on philosophy, culture,
and dem-ocracy in Africa (Ohio University Press, Ohio, Ill., 2002). Hountondji’s main concern
is to produce endogenous theories, i.e. theories by Africans. As he writes, ‘African scholars
involved in African Studies should have another priority, which is to develop first and fore-most
an Africa-based tradition of knowledge in all disciplines, a tradition where questions are initiated
and research agendas set out directly or indirectly by African societies them-selves.’ Paulin J.
Hountondji, ‘Knowledge of Africa, knowledge by Africans: Two perspec-tives on African Studies’, RCCS Annual Review 1 (2009)
annualreview/media/2009%20issue%20n.%201/AR1_6.PHountondji_RCCS80.pdf> (11 November 2016). lOMoAR cPSD| 40799667 132 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
boundaries and speak not only to Africa-specific audiences but also to broader global concerns.
Africanists can only rise to this challenge by resisting the temptation to
retreat to the safety of specificity and exclusive country expertise, that is,
by being willing to negotiate a tradition of study that values the idio-
graphic above all and move some way towards engagement with the
theor-etical and with more generalized knowledge. This need not (and
indeed should not) entail an unconditional embrace of large-scale n-
studies and universal predictive laws, and it is necessary to remain
acutely attuned to the dangers of falling prey to the limitations of macro-
approaches and meta-theory.20 Instead it requires nimble negotiation of
the specific and the general—by no means an easy challenge! Below I
suggest that an assemblage approach offers one way of meeting this
challenge and bring-ing Africa into IR in a manner that appreciated both
its specificity and its globality, while simultaneously keeping a careful
eye on the politics of doing so.
Assembling the global from the African ground up
An assemblage approach to the study of Africa differs in significant ways
from other, more well-known critiques of Western knowledge, such as
post-colonial or decolonial perspectives.21 These approaches seek to
expose the false universality of Western thought, to write history from a
different per-spective and thereby lay bare its provinciality and
particularity, as well as its implication in power, violence, and
domination. Assemblage thinking pro-vides a similar critique by making
visible the complicities, silences, and unspoken value judgments of
many taken-for-granted analytical concepts, but its foundation is a more
wholesale, ontological scepticism that is marked by a radical rejection of
predefined totalities and reified units of analysis.22 20.
For a relevant discussion on different methodologies and African Studies, see Nic
Cheeseman, Carl Death and Lindsay Whitfield, ‘Notes on researching Africa’, oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/afrafj/introduction+research+notes.pdf> (12 November 2016). 21.
This is not the place for a detailed review of these (and other) perspectives, but see
Edward Said, Orientalism (Pantheon Books, New York, 1978); Dipesh Chakrabarty,
Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference (Princeton University
Press, Princeton, NJ., 2000); Walter D. Mingolo, The darker side of Western modernity:
Global futures, decolonial options (Duke University Press, Durham, NC., 2011). For a
discussion of post-colonial theory and African Studies, see Rita Abrahamsen, ‘African Studies
and the post-colonial challenge’, African Affairs 102, 407 (2003), pp. 189–210.
22. There is no single assemblage theory or methodology, and indeed, for some, assem-
blage thinking does not amount to a theory, but rather ‘a repository of methods and onto-
logical stances towards the social’. Michele Acuto and Simon Curtis, ‘Assemblage thinking
and International Relations’, in Michele Acuto and Simon Curtis (eds), Reassembling
inter-national theory (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2014), p. 3. lOMoAR cPSD| 40799667
AFRICA AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 133
Concepts such as state, society, or the international help make sense of
the world and order complex social phenomena into categories, theories,
and causal mechanisms, but they simultaneously risk forcing the social
world to conform to preconceived definitions and categories. Concepts and
theories can thus become straightjackets, deprived of explanatory value and
unable to capture difference, rapid change, and social transformations.
Instead of seeing how social relations work, differ, and change, the social
scientist looks for the ‘state’ or ‘society’, expecting them to conform to pre-
determined patterns and dynamics. An assemblage methodology entails a
more open and agnostic attitude to the social world, seeking to take account
of the provisional and historically contingent relations between
heterogeneous elements, both human and non-human.23 Put differ-ently,
and more concretely, the object or area of study—be it the state, society,
Africa, or the international—is not predetermined by existing theories and
categories, but instead approached as something to be dis-covered
empirically in the way that different elements are fitted together into
contingent systems of varying durability.24 From this perspective, politics
and society in any location is assembled, as opposed to onto-logically given,
the building blocks being a multiplicity of actors, actants, knowledges,
norms, values, and technologies, some local, some global, some public, and
some private. ‘The international’, as IR’s object of study, is thus potentially
found in any location and can be traced in its specificity from the ground up
in assemblages that inhabit national settings but are stretched across sovereign boundaries.
As an approach to the study of Africa, assemblage thinking is attractive
for several interconnected reasons. First, by acknowledging the assembled
character of all social worlds, polities, and politics, it does not start from a
priori categories or predefined units and norms of analysis. Instead it seeks
to discover—from the ground up—how contingent elements are assembled
and come to work together, whether harmoniously or competitively, and
accordingly it is less burdened by the baggage collected by decades of
Western-centric inquiries. Second, it draws attention to multi-scalar con-
nections, abandoning strict dichotomies between the global and the local,
the international, and the domestic. The social world is approached as one
analytical field or as an assemblage that is not wholly determined by its
location within a national setting, but is instead shaped in the interaction of a
multiplicity of local and global actors and forces. By abandoning the strict
boundary between the domestic and the international, or the beloved
inside/outside distinction of IR, causal connections and influences are
23. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the social (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007).
24. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A thousand plateaus (University of Minneapolis
Press, Minneapolis, MN., 2003). lOMoAR cPSD| 40799667 134 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
stretched further, allowing an escape from the frequent essentialism
entailed in depicting something as ‘African’. Global influences and
responsibilities, and their local entanglements, are thus brought more
clearly into view. Third, assemblage thinking entails a recognition of dif-
ference and pluralism, as no two assemblages are the same. As such, it
offers a way of avoiding the universalism and Western-centrism of many
IR and comparative perspectives, where difference is always measured
against a norm. Fourth, and finally, thinking with assemblages privileges
an approach that is attuned to change, to how different social orders
come in to being and how they endure. It privileges neither the fixed nor
the contingent, but by focusing on actual assemblages and how things
function together, it turns what is frequently (in other approaches) the-
oretical commitments into empirical, practical questions of what social
orders look like, what makes them possible, and what is required for
them to endure. As such, it draws attention to the multiple forms and
sources of agency, and the different forms of power, resources, and
cap-acities different actors and actants possess.
As an illustration, consider the African state from an assemblage per-
spective. The African state, it seems, can be almost endlessly
pathologized as some deviant form of an ideal Weberian, Western state;
suffice to men-tion the neopatrimonial state, the weak state, the failed
state, the crimina-lized state, the quasi-sovereign state, and so on.
Many analyses of the state are in this way a classic example of the
application of theory to Africa, seeking to fit its institutions and practices
into an already existing model—and constantly finding it wanting.
In my own research I encountered this analytical proclivity when investi-
gating the global rise and authority of private security in international polit-
ics.25 In discussions about security privatization, Africa was curiously
present and absent at one and the same time; present as a worse case,
doomsday scenario, yet absent as a serious site for empirical and theoret-
ical investigation of the causes and implications for politics, security, and
global governance. Most discussions started from the classic Weberian def-
inition of the state and its monopoly of the legitimate use of force, drawing
attention to the fact that in the majority of African countries this monopoly
had never existed. The state, in other words, was already a weak or failed
state and in accordance with this theoretical commitment, the rise of pri-vate
actors, be they mercenaries, commercial security companies or vigi-lantes,
was interpreted as yet another indication of the failure and continued decline of the African state.26
25. Rita Abrahamsen and Michael C. Williams, Security beyond the state: Private
security in international politics (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011).
26. E.g. Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, ‘Weak states and the growth of the private security
sector in Africa: Whither the African state’, in Sabelo Gumedze (ed.), Private security in lOMoAR cPSD| 40799667
AFRICA AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 135
While this picture captures some salient aspects of recent transforma-
tions in security provision and governance, it not only risks essentializing the
African state but also misses more profound shifts and restructurings both at
the global and the local level. An assemblage approach, by com-parison,
brings these evolving dynamics more clearly into view, and applied to
security privatization and the state the four advantages of assemblage
thinking identified above translates as follows. First, from an assemblage
perspective, the impact of security privatization cannot start from an a priori
definition of the state and an assumption of its power and authority over
other actors. Instead it calls for a careful empirical investi-gation of how
social order, authority, and security are assembled in inter-action,
negotiation, and competition between a range of different actors, including
the private, the public, its security forces, as well as a host of more distant
global actors, discourses, values, norms, and technologies. Our own
research reveals that rather than a straightforward weakening of the state,
the multiple processes of security privatization cannot be cap-tured in a
vocabulary restrained by the opposition of state weakness and state
strength. Instead, in numerous different locations—from the swamps of the
Niger Delta to the streets of Cape Town—private security actors are part of
processes that transform security provision and governance and that in turn
give rise to new institutions, practices, and forms of authority.27 Within these
‘global security assemblages’ different global and local, public, and private
agents interact, cooperate, and compete, and security and governance are
shaped and influenced by normative orders both within and beyond the
nation state. Private and global actors and norms interact with the public
and the national to such a degree that it is often difficult to determine where
the public ends and the private begins, and by the same token, where the
global ceases and the local starts. Within global security assemblages, then,
the very categories of public/private and global/local are being reconstituted
and reconfigured, and far from conforming to any predefined object of
analysis, the state is being assembled or reassembled, not from scratch, but
in ways that alter and challenge many preconceived notions of the
public/private and the global/local. The state, in other words, is not
necessarily or automatically weakened, but instead the construction of the
state proceeds apace with— and in relationship with—a multitude of other
actors within global secur-ity assemblages.
Africa (Institute of Security Studies, Pretoria, 2007), pp.17–38; Michelle Small, ‘Privatisation of
security and military functions and the demise of the modern nation-state in Africa’, Occasional
Paper Series 1:2 (ACCORD, London, 2006); Peter Singer, Corporate war-riors: The rise of
the privatized military industry (Cornell University Press, Itacha, NY, 2003).
27. Abrahamsen and Williams, Security beyond the state. lOMoAR cPSD| 40799667 136 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
Second, by abandoning the inside/outside dichotomy and approaching
the social world as one analytical field, an assemblage approach shows how
both the causes and effects of security privatization cannot be con-tained
within the African continent. Specifically, the phenomenal growth of private
security actors cannot be explained only with reference to the African state
or African security governance but is intimately connected to multiple global
transformations in governance, technologies, norms, and values. Most
notably, the move towards forms of governing that empow-ers the private
sector, while strengthening various mechanisms of rule at a distance, has
not only facilitated the emergence of a global security sector in search for
overseas markets but also embedded the private within the institutions of
the public. The rise of the risk society and risk-based think-ing and
technologies are similarly important, as are international trade norms and
regulations that delink security from politics and the exclusive purview of the
state and instead treat it as a ‘service’ like any other.28 The involvement of
private security in African settings in turn further strength-ens the authority
and legitimacy of commercial actors and enhances their ability to shape
global security thinking, strategies, regulation, and govern-ance. What is at
stake in ‘security privatization’ is thus much more than a simple transfer of
previously public functions to private actors. Instead, security privatization
indicates important developments in the relationship between security and
the sovereign state, structures of political power and authority, and the
operations of global capital. Approached from an assemblage perspective,
the study of security privatization and its effects on the African state is not
then only a story of local specificity but also of global practices and
transformations. While security privatization has its own particular
articulation in different settings, the notion of an assem-blage allows us to
capture local complexity and specificity and at the same time trace
connections, relations, and transformations from the African ground up. It
allows not only for an in-depth inquiry and understanding of African
specificity but also for the development of a broader theoretical and
analytical framework for the analysis of global security governance.
Studying Africa is thus simultaneously to study the world, or international
relations, and to contribute to disciplinary debates.
Third, because no two assemblages are the same, an assemblage
approach facilitates the empirical exploration of the relationships between
the state and private security actors, without an explicit or implicit com-
parison to a Western state norm. Rather the focus is on exploring and
explaining the manner in which the state and its security functions come 28.
On risk society, see Ulrich Beck, Risk society: Towards a new modernity (Sage, London,
1992). For further elaboration on the interconnected causes of security privatization, see
Abrahamsen and Williams, Security beyond the state, chapter 2. lOMoAR cPSD| 40799667
AFRICA AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 137
into being and are shaped by different histories, cultures, and dynamics,
without seeking to identify their deviance from a given standard. This
means, for example, that the colonial origin of the state and the emer-
gence of its security forces as defenders of the regime rather than guar-
dians of citizens become historically significant factors. But it does not
mean that normative judgments about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ state behaviours
and security practices cannot be made, or that political evaluation
should be suspended in the name of blind relativism. Instead, it requires
us to be upfront about our values and judgments and to recognize the
implicit biases of many predefined social science concepts and
variables, and the manner in which they are tied to a specific Western
historiography and epistemology.
Fourth, and finally, by approaching the state and social orders not as
fixed or static, but as contingent and evolving, an assemblage approach
draws attention to the manner in which different actors are empowered or
disempowered by transformations in security governance. In particular, it
shows how the move towards new public management, risk-based think-ing
and technologies have provided private security actors with new forms of
power, resources and authority that in turn have enabled them to expand,
interact, and negotiate with the public in more effective ways than before. It
also shows, however, how the state, the public police, mili-tary, and various
security institutions retain important forms of power and authority, and in this
way it places the politics and competition for resources and influence centre
stage. The question of who has the ability to determine security strategies
and orders thus becomes an empirical investigation centred on the forms of
power and authority operating within assemblages that are stretched
globally and include a multiplicity of actors, technologies, knowledges, and
normativities. For example, on the streets of Cape Town, the world’s biggest
private security company, Group4Security, could mobilize its expertise,
capital, and technology to gain a significant influence within security
provision and governance, but it could only do so in negotiation and
cooperation with local business cap-ital, the city administration, and the
public police.29 Understanding the politics of security, and by implication
who has access to the city, is accordingly a question of unravelling how
different actors access different forms of power and resources and how they
come together in different alliances and assemblages.
This becomes particularly important when engaging with the politics of
security—and the politics of studying Africa—in the post-9/11 environ-
ment. With the global war on terror and the emergence of Africa as the
29. Abrahamsen and Williams, Security beyond the state. lOMoAR cPSD| 40799667 138 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
new frontline in the fight against extremism,30 the reach and influence of
private security actors have expanded yet further, in part due to various
forms of outsourcing and in part due to the increasing securitization of the
continent and its development problems. This makes the analysis of Africa’s
security predicament more pressing, but as discussed above it also makes it
important to maintain sufficient critical distance to the agen-das of powerful
external actors. By drawing attention to the imbrication of the local and the
global and by focusing on the multiplicity of actors and their forms of
competition, an assemblage approach makes a careful ana-lysis of the
politics of security possible. Such an analysis would seek to specify the
forms of power, and by implication the responsibility, of differ-ent actors
within security assemblages, and in this way enables a critique of the
strategies of powerful states and non-state actors. Conclusion
The intention of this Research Note is neither to launch assemblage think-
ing as a new meta-narrative for the study of Africa in IR, nor to suggest that
this is the only legitimate or even the best way to study Africa. But as I have
argued, bringing Africa into IR cannot be simply a question of ‘add and stir’,
as the continent does not enter the discipline as a neutral object of study.
Instead, it is already overdetermined and embedded within the polit-ics and
structure of values of the academe, which are in turn influenced in complex
ways by changing geopolitical circumstances. IR’s increased awareness of
its own parochialism, combined with the present position of Africa as ‘the
frontline in the war on terror’, thus harbour both opportun-ities and dangers.
For these reasons, bringing Africa into IR involves com-plex epistemological
and methodological challenges relating to our object of study and political
challenges relating to the contemporary securitization of Africa. My modest
suggestion is that assemblage thinking offers one way of negotiating this
encounter between Africa and IR.
Epistemologically and methodologically, approaching Africa from an
assemblage perspective makes it possible to study Africa as both a place in
the world and as a place of the world, taking account of the uniqueness of
place and its simultaneous globality. Put differently, it allows for a theor-
ization of the international from the African ground up. In this approach,
Africa is not some distant locale whose relevance needs to be demon-
strated within the disciplines but instead a window on our contemporary
world. As such, my intervention echoes that of Jean Comaroff and John
Comaroff who have argued that the postcolonies might offer ‘privileged
30. For an interesting analysis, see Nick Turse, Tomorrow’s battlefield: US proxy
wars and secret ops in Africa (Haymarket Books, Chicago, Ill., 2015). lOMoAR cPSD| 40799667
AFRICA AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 139
insights into the workings of the world at large’.31 This is no easy under-
taking. On the part of Africanists, it requires a willingness to rethink their
object of study and the forms of capital routinely invoked to establish
expertise and status as an Africanist. On the part of IR scholars, it
requires a greater openness towards specificity and difference, without
simply add-ing ‘Africa’ as a symbolic badge of honour at a time when
non-Western approaches and policy relevance are part of new
theoretical fads and fund-ing requirements.
Politically, thinking in terms of assemblages offers no easy solution to the
risks of an African Studies in the service of the powerful. Much as assem-
blage approaches are critical of dominant ontologies, they can also have a
penchant for description rather than analysis and critique.32 At the same
time, the notion of an assemblage invariably draws attention to the multipli-
city of actors, their various forms of power, and their struggles over influ-
ence. Thinking politically with assemblages accordingly demands constant
attention and vigilance towards how the political orders of contemporary
Africa come into being, what forms of agency and power different actors,
actants, norms, and values have, in order to ensure that scholarship is not
simply serving the powerful but instead seeks to uncover new political possi-
bilities. Carefully executed, such analyses offer unique opportunities to
place the study of Africa at the centre of IR’s contemporary theoretical,
social, and political enquiries.
While this Research Note has focused on IR and security, an assem-
blage approach can also enrich African Studies more broadly. By recog-
nizing the manner in which the social world (the local and the global, the
specific and the general) is assembled in interaction and negotiation, an
assemblage approach makes it possible to keep the best of what the trad-
ition of African Studies has to offer in terms of detailed local knowledge and
country expertise, while simultaneously recognizing that Africa is also an
articulation of the world in which we live. This would enable a very dif-ferent
answer to the question posed by the provost in the edited collection by
Bates, Mudimbe, and O’Barr, as Africa is no longer some distant or deviant
locale whose relevance needs to be demonstrated within or to the
disciplines but instead a window on our contemporary world.
31. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, ‘Theory from the south: Or, how Euro-America
is evolving toward Africa’, Anthropological Forum 22, 2 (2012), pp. 113–131, p. 1; See
also Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall, ‘Writing the world from an African metropolis’,
Public Culture 16, 3 (2004), pp. 347–372.
32. Ben Anderson, Matthew Kearnes, Colin McFarlane, and Dan Swanton, ‘On assem-
blage and geography’, Dialogues in Human Geography 2, 2 (2012), pp. 171–189.