Short Abstract

African states, societies and economies are firmly implicated in current processes of world reordering. This panel aspires to refine the ‘African agency’ prism by soliciting theory-informed contributions on African strategic positionings in the contemporary geopolitical conjuncture.

Long Abstract

Mainstream scholarship on geopolitics tends to continuously neglect Africa’s centrality in current (as well as historical) processes of world reordering. ‘African agency’ has become an important analytical prism to correct this neglect, elucidating myriad ways in which African state, non-state and hybrid actors have shaped political, diplomatic, economic and cultural ties with so-called ‘great powers’. Notwithstanding rich accounts of ‘African agency’, the concept has simultaneously suffered from overuse and diminishing explanatory value. Particularly its relationship with the evolving geopolitical ‘meta-context’ has remained largely under-theorised, refracting from thorough engagement with structural underpinnings of the emerging post-neoliberal world order.

This panel aspires to broaden and deepen scholarly debates on how African actors navigate intensifying geopolitical and geoeconomic competition in an increasingly fragmented international order. Moving beyond representations of Africa as primarily an arena of geopolitical competition among outside forces, it places African actors and their strategic choices at the centre of the analysis, examining how they contest, negotiate or exploit structural pressures and opportunities. The panel particularly welcomes theory-informed analyses of African strategic positioning in contemporary geopolitics. It raises the question whether existing categories of non-alignment, hedging, bandwagoning, and more recent notions such as polyalignment and workarounding adequately capture the geopolitically informed and oriented strategies observed across the continent. Selected papers from the panel will be invited to contribute to a Special Issue on the topic in a major IR journal.

This Panel has 2 pending paper proposals.
Propose paper