Group items tagged

Mamdani sees the Save Darfur campaign as representing a refracted version of the moral logic of the War on Terror, with the Arabs in both cases branded as evil, except this time because they are genocidaires instead of terrorists.  The campaign to bring international troops to Darfur and to indict the Sudanese leadership at the International Criminal Court, and the willful ignorance about the successes of the African engagement with Darfur and the changing situation on the ground, are all portrayed as the product of this agenda

A third example is from politics, namely governance indicators and failed/fragile states index. Did anyone notice how Mali still performed on the Failed States Index even while it fell apart during 2011-12? We all know the story of that period: Mali faced a near-perfect storm of corruption and institutional collapse at the center that left the state eviscerated and penetrated by international drug trafficking cartels, with parts of its territory surrendered—with state complicity—to criminal gangs and Al Qa’ida in the Islamic Maghreb, which avowed extremist and separatist agendas. A military coup by a junior officer and the near total evaporation of state authority followed, leading to first a rescue plan by neighboring African countries, quickly overtaken by a French military intervention, which despite some battlefield successes, became bogged down in an intractable conflict.

Where is the ‘real politics’ of political management in all this? African scholars first destination is history or political ethnography: documenting what actually happens. This is vital but grossly undervalued. It is done principally by country experts working for think-tanks like the International Crisis Group and the Carnegie Endowment. For sure, these institutions do some superb analysis, and their senior staff can move into academic positions. But it is extraordinarily hard to build a career based on knowing what is really happening a country, especially if it happens to be your own country.

Consider the biases in academic reward and promotion. Teaching is undervalued. Peer-reviewed publication is rewarded, particularly if it appears in high-ranking journals that prefer certain methodologies and questions. Those methods are typically quantitative. They build beautiful castles in the air or palaces on foundations of sand.

Supervisors in foreign universities rarely have the subject matter expertise, so they tend to guide students towards more theoretical approaches. Examiners and peer reviewers likewise reward and reinforce their own disciplinary biases. On the other hand, it is common to see junior Western scholars doing rather uninteresting quantitative studies or superficial case studies. Despite their shortcomings these studies are published. These scholars, then, become the group that undertakes peer review.

To become an academic in a Western university she or he may be obliged to unlearn important knowledge, and learn frameworks and skills that are actually irrelevant to the situation at hand but are necessary for being considered a professional academic.