Le Malentendu International: remembering international relations with Jean-Marie Teno

The discipline of International Relations and cognate fields of Comparative Politics and Development Studies have more or less successfully contained the study of Africa’s condition within the limits of the dominant Western imagination, with grave consequences. Africa is seen and analyzed as a site of weak states and neopatrimonial rule. The continued dominance and ubiquity of such analytical vocabularies and their underlying methods rests on many forces, one of which is the reluctance to acknowledge that Africans can and do articulate their own analyses of their condition and to respect such analyses. This article seeks to remember some of the routinely forgotten international relations which structure Africa’s contemporary condition, by turning to the work of Cameroonian film director Jean-Marie Teno. Teno’s work, in particular Afrique Je Te Plumerai and Le Malentendu Colonial, is profoundly important for students of international relations. This article examines the content, form, and effect of the critique Teno elaborates in Afrique Je Te Plumerai

Definitions and categories: epistemologies of race and critique

One of the striking and important features of The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics is the breadth and depth of literature over two and a half centuries which is examined. Hobson reveals irrefutably the centrality of racialised thought to the foundations of the disciplinary field of International Relations. Such an exercise necessarily encounters difficult methodological questions. This contribution to the forum reflects on the methodological and epistemological challenges of the critique of racial thought. How should we define racialised or racist thought, and how should we distinguish the various strands of racial and eurocentric thought? Does it matter if a critique of racial thought employs modes of categorisation and typology which seem to mirror the epistemological or methodological features of some strands of racial thought itself

Time, history, politics: Anticolonial constellations

One of the most significant elements of the international relations of the twentieth century was the transformation from a colonial to a postcolonial world order. That transformation, contested, lengthy and uneven, was the fruit of struggles by colonised peoples for independence. The postcolonial experience has proved very different from that hoped for by the anticolonial generation. From the perspective of our own times, how can we learn from the thought and practice of those earlier struggles? In this article I first discuss the work of David Scott who has posed this question in compelling terms, arguing that our postcolonial present requires a tragic apprehension of anticolonialism. Finding his questions urgent but his conclusions too restrictive, I turn to Walter Benjamin, and show how his method offers alternative possibilities for exploring the questions that Scott poses. Drawing on archives of African anticolonialism I consider how we can engage with these struggles for our own times, through three elements of Benjamin’s approach: the question of time and temporality; the method of montage and quotation; and the device of the dialectical image. In doing so this article sketches possibilities of an anticolonial method suitable for our own neoliberal but still imperial times

'The civilised horrors of over-work: Marxism, imperialism and development of Africa'

In the 21 st century a vast number of people in Africa are direct producers, working very hard on the land to gain a meagre living -- they are the 'rural poor'. The condition of poverty in Africa is widely portrayed in both academic and popular discourse as a result of local factors, whether political, social, cultural or natural. This article argues for an historical materialist approach which exposes the condition of widespread routine poverty and malnutrition in Africa to be a modern world-historical product, the outcome of five centuries of global capitalist expansion under relations of imperialism

The global political economy of social crisis: Towards a critique of the 'failed state' ideology

The notion of 'failed states' has gained widespread currency in political and academic discourse. This article contributes to a critique of the 'failed states' discourse. It identifies methodological flaws in the 'failed states' discourse which undermine its explanatory power, and proposes an alternative framework for analysing conditions of social crisis in neocolonial states, rooted in global political economy. This paper focuses on conditions of crisis in Africa. The discourse of 'state failure' characterises conditions of crisis as local in origin, the product of culture or poor leadership. The current condition of structural crisis in so many of Africa's neocolonial states must be situated in the imperial history of global capitalism. This requires examining the legacy of colonial transformation; the specific form of the postcolonial state, society and economy after independence, which tended in many cases to give rise to factional struggles and authoritarian rule; and the ways in which such 'internal' social tensions and contradictions have been reinforced by the global political economy, both the geo-politics of the Cold War and the contradictions of global capitalism. The argument is developed through examination of the specific case of Somalia