Beyond history

This edited collection provides a vast empirical base demonstrating African agency in international relations (IR). It builds on prior work by a growing number of scholars that suggests the question of African agency must be taken more seriously and strategically outlines a remarkedly broad spatial and chronological scope to ‘document African actors in a state of proactivity as opposed to the reactionary framing Africa is often given in international relations’ (p. 4). In many ways, this work is a resounding success in providing empirical material to enrich existing theoretical discussions with a vast array of contemporary examples demonstrating its proactivity, without ignoring the many ways in which it continues to be acted upon. The volume consists of a foreword and 13 chapters, broken down into two parts. The first two chapters tackle the question of African agency and the continent’s place in IR broadly. The next seven chapters provide various empirical case studies that demonstrate this agency concretely, and the final four chapters offer more thematic overviews of specific issues in African politics. In the foreword, Zeleza outlines the many ways Africa has both historically and contemporarily been simultaneously central and marginal to global politics – central in constructing the modern world, yet marginal in directing and benefitting from it. Munyi, Mwambari, and Ylönen push this discussion in their introductory chapter, providing a number of examples of Africa at both ends of the equation. They suggest that there has been a real push for intellectual intent in analysing the actions, resolve, and strategies of Africans to be taken seriously in global politics and begin to create roots from which the following empirical chapters advance. Empirical examples discussed include the International Criminal Court, African summit diplomacy, Afro-Arab relations, the African Union, a number of conflicts on the continent, as well as discussion of broader themes such as gender, brotherhood, and African film.

Agency (philosophy) · Archaeology · Diplomacy · Epistemology · Framing (construction) · International relations · Political science · Politics · Reactionary · Social science · Sociology · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · History · Law