Meeting of Political Analysis on Africa for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the CEAN Think Republic: State, Government, Social Compass in Africa

Location: Bordeaux Institute of Political Studies
Dates: 3-5 September 2008
Workshop Submission Deadline: December 15, 2007
Abstract Submission Deadline: March 15, 2008
Website: http://cean.cinquantenaire.sciencespobordeaux.fr

The CEAN wishes to mark its fiftieth anniversary by holding an international Meeting of political analysis on Africa. Although it does not intend to make a self-congratulatory event, those first fifty years of its existence will indeed have their place. There are many questions to be addressed: who, at the beginning of the 21st century, can truly claim to understand the full scope of the many realities of “Africa” – sub-Saharan regions, Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, diasporas and emigration? Difficult as it is to address this sort of macro-question, it is nonetheless necessary (What is Africa? What is “development”? What does “post-colonial” mean? etc.). The intention is to address this set of questions from a perspective that is directly political, taking the word in its broadest acception, by studying not only the Republic but also the republic. It is quite purposefully that no precise definition is given in the title, the idea being that the analysis should range from its strictest sense (the “government”) to its broadest meaning (res publica), including the various acceptions of the state (in the sense of Weber, Marx, Elias, etc.). At all events, the focus will be on the standards of distribution, regulation and integration, and on the social, identity and gender participation and marginalisation that are appended, imposed or applied, by more or less authoritarian or democratic means, in societies that are inventing or reinventing “ways of making do” (evasion, trickery, appropriation, etc.).

This approach is necessarily multidisciplinary, in the image of the activity of the CEAN over the last twenty years – an activity that is very much that of an inter-disciplinary centre of political studies focussed on the many different faces of Africa. We are therefore inviting political scientists, historians, geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, economists and specialists in law and the arts to converge from their different standpoints towards political analysis through this study of the Republic.

Any meeting, even international and multidisciplinary, needs themes for structuration. Those defined here are not claimed to be exhaustive, but the intention is to address the central issues. Africa appears to be one of the “places in the world” where the question of the state seems at its most problematic with all the possible forms of negation (failed, collapsed, weak, soft, strong, authoritarian, fragile states), where there seem to be the fewest “emerging countries”, where “societies of citizens” seem most outnumbered by “societies of subjects” (in the sense of subjection, rather than that of action), where no one knows where to start tackling “corruption” and where globalization produces little in the way of industrialisation, unlike the other countries of the southern hemisphere. After a generation of studies on the state in Africa where do things stand today? The study of societies of citizenship or subjection will be structured around the following themes:

1. The state in its historicity
2. The relationship between the individual and the citizen
3. Categories of states, political dynamics of institutional design
4. Perceptions of power, political representations and practices
5. The Republic and globalization
Centre d'études d'Afriquze noire
Institut d'études politiques de Bordeaux
11, allée Ausone
33607 Pesac Cedex
France
Email: cean.cinquantenaire@sciencespobordeaux.fr