Short Abstract

Looking through African prisms, this panel explores how African actors experience, make sense of, articulate, and position themselves within the crisis of the international liberal order, and how they envision and contribute to the making and re-making of future global orders.

Long Abstract

The contemporary international order is undergoing profound transformation yet debates about its state and trajectory have often centred on great power politics and treated Africa primarily in binary terms as inside or outside the liberal international order. This panel instead asks what we can learn about a changing world by looking through African prisms: How are global transformations experienced and made sense of? Where and how does African agency co-constitute the (re-)ordering of the world? What are everyday, popular, and vernacular intellectual imaginations, practices, and articulations of world-making from Africa?

We invite contributions that examine where and how contemporary processes of world (re-)ordering manifest across Africa. Contributions may explore African actors' agency, visions, and sense-making, and how the global dis/order is imagined, practiced, constituted, contested, and transformed from different vantage points. They may draw on everyday articulations, lived experience, cultural production, and thought rooted in interactions among African citizens and with external actors, ideas, and practices. We particularly welcome diverse theoretical perspectives, methodologies, and empirical perspectives, drawing on the continent at large, its sub-regions, states, individuals, societal actors, including African diaspora, transnational networks, and regional/international organizations. Thematically, contributions may address diplomacy and foreign policy, humanitarianism, economics, peace, security, justice, restitution, AI governance, climate negotiations, and beyond.

The panel thus moves from asking where Africa stands in the world order to asking how African actors experience, make sense of, articulate, and position themselves within global transformation and how they envision and contribute to the (re-)making of future global orders.

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