This paper explores the assumptions of civilizational identities purely based on cultural, religious or geographical distinctions and their limitations. It reviews the ‘civilizations’ discourse in IR and discusses the concept of ‘civilization states’ in the context of China and India. It analyzes the key components of civilizational overlaps and exchanges between these two countries and the invocation of their ‘civilization-state’ identity in their contemporary bilateral relations. Rejecting Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ hypothesis in understanding ‘civilization-states’ like China and India, I conclude that it is critical to understand how states perceive their civilizational heritage, which both facilitates and impedes bilateral exchanges and the conduct of international relations.
The Entrapment of Africa within the Global Colonial Matrices of Power
This article deploys world-systems analysis and the concept of coloniality to
examine the experience of the African people within the modern world-system
since 1492, a date that figuratively marks the birth of the modern world-system
and its shifting international orders. Africa’s experience is contextualized within
six international orders: the post-1492 order, the Westphalian order that emerged
in 1648, the post-1884–1885 Berlin consensus, the post-1945 United Nations
normative order, the Cold War epoch that ended in 1989, the current neoliberal
dispensation as well as the post 9/11 anti-terrorism and securitization. While
Africans have actively contested Euro–North American hegemony throughout these
periods, they have not yet succeeded in breaking the strong global technologies of
coloniality that continue to prevent the possibilities of African agency. This is why
this article ends with a call for deepening the decolonization and deimperialization
of the international order in the twenty-first century.
Border Securitisation and Politics of State Policy in Nigeria, 2014–2017
This article examines the politics of public policies characterised by increased securitisation of Nigeria’s national boundary from 2014 to 2017. While the regulation appears on paper to discourage transborder crime, capital outflow and sustain a favourable balance of payment, the existing armoury of West African border literature argues otherwise. What is new in the transborder dynamics of West Africa? What informs government’s border policies in Nigeria? In answering these questions, this study provides a template for a reassessment of the gap between borderlands theory and policy in West Africa. The approach is comparative based on the critical analysis of oral interviews, government trade records, newspaper reports and the extant literature. The article provides a platform for rethinking of the nexus between governance and development in West Africa from the securitisation and neo-patrimonial perspectives. It concludes that effective border management in Nigeria is set aback by misguided and dysfunctional elitist-centred regulations that are devoid of the realities on the ground.
Women, Gender and Development in Africa
Gender denotes the social prescriptions associated with biological sex in regard to roles, behaviour, appearance, cognition, emotions, and so on. Social relations of gender or gender relations encompass all relationships in which gender subjectivities play a role, including those among people, and between people and the institutions, systems, and processes of development. The chapter describes three features of gender relations that are generally consistent across societies – gender ideologies and myths; gendered division of labor; and unequal power relationships – and discusses their implications for development. The chapter further explains the centrality of gender to the development enterprise and discusses various approaches to integrating gender analysis in development processes.
The Ghana Trades Union Congress and the Politics of International Labor Alliances, 1957–1971*
This article explores the motives of Ghana’s Trades Union Congress in
securing development assistance during the era of decolonization and early independence. African interests and agency in these complex processes of negotiation have not been sufficiently untangled to highlight the decisions that African trade unionists made as they aligned with, and fostered, international networks and alliances to meet particular development goals. By highlighting the perspectives and actions of Ghana’s trade union officials, the article demonstrates what Africans sought to achieve through connections to international trade union organizations. The Ghana case illustrates the ways in which African trade unionists actively engaged in the variable and competing politics and policies of local, regional, and global trade unionism in order to strengthen their union apparatus and meet shifting needs.