Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to propose an epistemological critique of the knowledge on contemporary African conflicts and civil wars. Though Africa is a major site for the production of knowledge on contemporary conflicts, there remain significant limitations in the way these conflicts are represented, interpreted, theorised and understood. Whether in scholarly reflections, media representations or policy debates, conventional discourses on African civil wars remain, for the most part, severely limited and grossly inadequate. Focused mainly on their instrumental values, and concerned with providing simplistic explanations, these mainstream interpretations, especially in policy circles and media representation, reinforce certain prejudicial biases and stereotypes against the continent, making it possible for the enactment of certain power relations, while at the same time avoiding the more fundamental question of epistemology and power (i.e. how power works to produce subjectivities, define the realities of the conflict and shape Northern attitudes towards the African continent as a result of these conflicts).

In a series of interventions positioned in adversarial relationship with these kinds of discourses, this presentation seeks to raise questions about the limitations of the mainstream approaches and conventional interpretations of African conflicts. Using the Sierra Leone civil war as my case study, it seeks to consider the problematique of knowledge production in relation to (a) the modalities of the dominant theoretical perspectives on contemporary African civil wars; (b) who produces them, how and why? (c) the epistemological frames on which they rely; (d) the nature of the power that makes them possible, the particular interpretive dispositions they foreground and the ones they preclude or foreclose; and finally (e) the roles of these knowledges in the articulation of Western policy towards Africa. In short this presentation seeks to interrogate the structures within which knowledge is produced about African conflicts, and the power relations they make possible. Central to the issues that this paper will grapple with, is what I regard as the knowledge question, which in fact is not new, but is an old problematique central to African Social Sciences and Systems of thoughts. By knowledge question, I refer to a specific concern: namely, how to talk about Africa; in what epistemological frame[s], who can/should propose it and how?