Abstract
This article takes stock of the state of African Studies and argues that (1) research on Africa is strongly dominated by outside, non-African, mostly Western views; (2) there is a tendency towards undifferentiated views on “Africa,” which usually concentrate on negative aspects, overlooking progress in many areas; (3) methodologies that focus on causal identification are rarely used; and (4) the field focuses on micro-perspectives while few works examine the big picture and the longue durée. The article then argues that Comparative African Studies, which builds upon the concept of Comparative Area Studies, can address some of these challenges. A pronouncedly comparative perspective would help to systematically combine and contrast “outside” and “inside” perspectives in order to better identify causal relationships and general trends both within Africa and between Africa and other regions. Consequently, African Studies requires more resources and should more effectively engage in multi-disciplinary and mixed-methods research.
Introduction
While headlines on conflicts, diseases, poverty, and other problems dominate Africa’s image in the Western world, many long-term positive developments in political and socio-economic terms have also come about. Africa’s diversity and particular dynamics make the continent a rewarding and important region to study. But how can we further advance African Studies? The first section of this article takes stock of and discusses four interrelated challenges of African Studies: (1) the field’s domination by outside, non-African, mostly Western scholars; (2) a tendency towards undifferentiated views on “Africa” with an often strongly negative tone; (3) a neglect of methodologies that focus on causal identification; and (4) the paucity of studies on the big picture and the longue durée. The second major part of the article outlines how “Comparative African Studies” can contribute to addressing some of these shortcomings. Using the concept of Comparative Area Studies (CAS) as a starting point (e.g. Ahram et al., 2018), I argue in favour of a pronouncedly comparative perspective in several aspects. First, outside and inside perspectives on the region should be combined more effectively, which will also require creating more capacity, incentives, and opportunity for African scholars. Second, African Studies need more resources and should more effectively engage in multi-disciplinary and mixed-methods research. While micro-perspectives are obviously important and often the only way to identify causality, scholars should not neglect macro-comparison across time and space. Such comparisons are crucial to identifying long-term developments not only within Africa but also in comparison to other regions. If we engage in Comparative African Studies, undifferentiated and incorrect negative views on the region can be challenged. More importantly, the field will be better able to understand problems and contribute to policies designed to support positive trends and meet Africa’s challenges.
Before turning to the four challenges, it makes sense to reveal my personal background and related biases. I am a trained political scientist (with the two additional minor subjects sociology and psychology). I have been analysing African politics since 1996, combining several methodologies – or methods, to be more precise – such as “desk study,” focus groups, semi-structured interviews, surveys, survey experiments, lab-in-the-field experiments, Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), and regression analyses, the latter often on the basis of self-compiled cross-country data sets. Aside from having conducted many interviews with locals, I have also undertaken a tiny bit of grassroots-level fieldwork outside bigger cities. Altogether, I have visited nineteen African countries, but have never lived in any longer than a few months. As a result, I have gained insights into everyday realities, but my research remains shaped by a macro-perspective.
My ontological and epistemological background is inspired by Karl Popper’s critical rationalism (e.g. Popper, 2005). I believe in an outside world and in rigorous empirical testing. I subscribe to the idea that research should contribute to problem-solving, especially when related to a region where, despite many positive aspects and improvements, many problems persist. All results, however, are preliminary until proven wrong. Following Max Weber (1930), I believe it is very important to try to separate personal political convictions and scholarship, although that might be difficult to achieve completely. Accordingly, the constant challenge for a scholar is to remain impartial and work against any personal confirmation bias that may result from potentially unconscious preconceptions.
Finally, I should note that I concentrate, though not exclusively, on the state of African Studies in Germany. The reason is simple: I know more about African Studies in Germany than in other countries. It goes without saying that all my views are preliminary and I invite readers to disagree and to suggest corrections and modifications. Knowledge production requires open and critical debate.
Four Interrelated Challenges of African Studies
In order to have a more systematic picture of current trends in African Studies, this section on challenges is based on an overview of the authorship and content of the latest issues of three leading journals on African Studies that study African politics – namely, African Affairs, the Journal of Modern African Studies, and Africa Spectrum (Table 1). 1 The overview is based on a systematic assessment of abstracts and author biographies according to a number of previously established criteria, such as the origin of authors, their disciplines, the geographical and temporal scope of the studies, and comparative and other methodological elements. The period under investigation is a “snapshot” as it covers only the aforementioned journals’ issues from 2019 and early 2020, resulting in a sample of sixty-six articles.
Authorship and Content in Three Leading African Studies Journals (2019 to Early 2020).
Source: Author’s compilation, abstract coding by Sarah Wenzel.
*In articles with multiple authors, we coded as “yes” (1) even if only one of the authors is African or based at an African university.
**Percentages count actual shares of authors per article (e.g. two co-authors counted as 0.5 per article); journals were selected because of publishing on African politics, thus necessarily including political and other social sciences.
Challenge #1: Domination of Outside, Often Western Perspectives
At the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in San Francisco in 2019, the African Politics Conference Group (APCG) – now a full section of APSA called “African Politics” – organised a roundtable, chaired by Zachariah Mampilly, that discussed how to promote the inclusion of African scholars. The participants agreed that most works on African politics come from non-African authors. Constantine Manda, formerly at Yale and now at the University of Dar-es-Salaam, noted that only 17 percent of all articles and books on African politics are written by Africans. 2 The analysis of the articles in the three journals corroborates this view. Only 13 percent of all articles were written or co-authored by a scholar based at an African university (Table 1). If African authors based at non-African institutions are included, the percentage of authors of African origin rises to approximately 30 percent. While that may sound more comforting than a percentage lagging in the teens, it still means that 70 percent of authors are of non-African origin. The community acknowledges the problem, and efforts to “research with the region” have been making headway in the United States, Germany, and elsewhere. The Arnold Bergstraesser Institute (ABI), led by Andreas Mehler, has been especially successful in leading several initiatives in Germany, such as the Maria Sibylla Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA). In co-operation with the University of Ghana in Accra, MIASA seeks to institutionalise co-operation with African scholars. Similar initiatives in other countries are underway.
However, the main reason for the underrepresentation of African scholars might not be intentional marginalisation. Scholars at the APSA roundtable agreed that the lack of resources for higher education in African countries is part of the challenge. Indeed, it would be miraculous if the underfunding of universities and research institutions on the African continent had no impact on their “output” measures according to traditional “Western” metrics. Moreover, incentive structures frequently do not favour publication. Scholars in Africa are often underpaid or irregularly paid, if at all. Consultancy work pays the bills, not journal publications. For Western scholars, publications are the currency that buys positions, tenure, and higher salaries, but the picture looks different for African scholars. African universities have started to introduce tenure tracks that require publications, but such initiatives may falter as long as consultancies continue to be more lucrative. Leonard Wantchékon, professor at Princeton University and founder of the African School of Economics (ASE), added at the APSA meeting that training at African institutions often neglects the basics and instead focuses on applied sciences, thus failing to lay a solid foundation for scholars. So, inclusion of African scholars is a matter of resources and incentives, not just intentions.
Going beyond the very obvious point of departure that African realities should not be recounted by (only) outside voices, the broader inclusion of African views offers some distinct benefits. The outside perspectives of Western and other non-African scholars are burdened with a number of stereotypes, and these scholars often evince a lack of specific knowledge (for the Global South, see also Narlikar, 2016). As we discussed political parties in Niger in a cosy office in Niamey back in 2006, Mahaman Tidjani Alou made me realise that Niger’s parties do not conform to the alleged characteristics – and subsequent deficiencies – delineated by “conventional wisdom” (see also Olivier de Sardan and Tidjani Alou, 2009). European scholars have a tendency to compare African real types with European ideal types, not being aware of actual deficits of Western political parties and democracies. The political party systems in France and Italy, for instance, are much more fragmented and less institutionalised than party systems in countries such as Ghana and Tanzania. What we need is a diversity of views in conjunction with constant questioning of our own biases. We should also be careful not to essentialise group identity in authorship.
Challenge #2: Undifferentiated and Often Negative Views
Sub-Saharan Africa as a region hosts no fewer than forty-nine independent states, which differ greatly regarding socio-economic and cultural variables, as well as in terms of regime type and political stability. Within countries, there are often huge differences as well. Almost inevitably, most Africanists are in fact not experts on the whole region but rather on certain groups of countries, individual countries, or regions within countries 3 – let alone that we all cover only a fraction of economic, social, and political aspects. Scholars often extrapolate from specific experiences, and some countries are studied more often than others. 4 Generalists are rare and inevitably often lack specific knowledge on topics and countries. Nevertheless, sweeping statements on “Africa” are not infrequent. Statements on “the African state,” “African political parties,” or “democratic backsliding in Africa” are not uncommon. 5 This is not to discredit generalisations per se, but they must stand the test of sufficient accuracy. The classical work by Bratton and van de Walle (1997) on democratisation in Africa, Mehler’s study on power-sharing in Africa Mehler (2009), and Arriola’s (2009) contribution on cabinets, clientelism, and stability in forty countries are examples of how general statements can be well reasoned and evidenced.
Certainly, the African Studies community is aware of the challenge and is leading the struggle against negative stereotypes of the continent. However, African Studies must reckon with its own share of negativism. Above, I pointed to the unfair (and probably unconscious) comparison of real and ideal types regarding party systems and regime types. However, I make no excuse for myself here: in my studies of armed conflicts, I have concentrated on the cases of violence, not peace. It took reading the works of non-Africanists (Pinker, 2018; Rosling et al., 2018) for me to realise that we may have witnessed a decline of violence in Africa. While democratisation is certainly not “completed,” the rise of multi-partyism since 1990 is remarkable, especially when viewed in light of the neighbouring region of the Middle East, which shows more favourable socio-economic preconditions. Also, some key socio-economic indicators have dramatically improved (Basedau, 2019). Since 1990, income has doubled, infant mortality has halved, and life expectancy has increased by no less than ten years (from approximately fifty to sixty years). While I could not agree more that a “feel-good narrative” can be dangerous (Wadongo, 2014), progress should be acknowledged, not only for the sake of fairness. Only when we correctly identify causes can we exploit our knowledge to promote further progress. 6
Challenge #3: Missing Out on the “Causal Revolution”
African Studies and Area Studies in general have undergone several “turns” in recent decades, such as “the cultural turn,” “the linguistic turn,” and the “spatial turn” (e.g. Bachmann-Medick, 2016; Chaney, 2002; Engel, 2003). However, African Studies and the humanities in particular have somewhat missed out on what can be called a “causal-identification revolution” (see e.g. Kimberly, 2016; Morgan, 2016). Although one may disagree with the potentially pretentious character of the term, the idea behind it is quite substantial. In a multi-faceted social world, it is extremely difficult to reliably identify causes and effects. Ruling out variables other than the presumed cause of a given effect remains a fundamental challenge. Identifying causes and effects is one precondition for designing policies that can solve problems. 7
Particularly economists, but also political and other social scientists, have increasingly applied methods that can help identify causal relationships. Generally, causality can be identified through controlled and rigorous comparison (see e.g. Sartori, 1991). If we find a presumed cause and effect in one incident but not in another that is otherwise identical, we can assume that we have found a causal relationship. Advances in multi-variate regression analyses can increase confidence that correlations do represent causation, but arguably can never really rule out reverse causality or the omission of variables with superior explanatory power. More promising but traditional ways to determine cause are natural experiments or most-similar-systems designs, but they are rarely applicable because they require the presence of real-world conditions, which are a matter of luck rather than deliberate design by scholars. Inspired by psychology and behavioural economics, experiments have become more fashionable. Researchers can create the conditions themselves and ensure that presumed cause–effect relations are not resulting from differences between the instances that are compared. If two groups of participants share the same characteristics but react differently to a stimulus, it is fair to conclude a causal relationship. Since the ground-breaking study by Wantchekon (2003) on clientelism in election campaigns in Benin, experimental studies have increasingly addressed African cases – and not only in terms of politics (e.g. Hoffmann et al., 2019; Mbiti et al., 2019).
Causal identification can also be achieved through qualitative methods, especially process-tracing (e.g. Beach and Rasmus, 2013; Morgan, 2016). While process-tracing seems to be a buzzword for case-based studies, it can also contribute to identifying causation (see also Blatter et al., 2016). Sophisticated process-tracing requires careful and detailed theorising of causal mechanisms. These mechanisms are usually complicated and include several actions of actors in a given context. If we can observe these mechanisms and show that they actually play out, confidence in causality can be strongly increased. None of these methodologies should be seen as a magic bullet. Process-tracing requires a systematic effort, and there are few examples of successful implementation (e.g. Poteete et al., 2010). Experiments often have ethical concerns, are mostly artificial, and lack external validity, meaning that generalisation is mostly not possible. Moreover, there is another price to pay, which I detail below as the final challenge.
Challenge #4: Micro-Perspectives Instead of the Big Picture and the Longue Durée
As outlined in the previous section, causal identification is more difficult for cross-country samples. Identifying causality thus often comes at the price of focusing on micro-perspectives. The problem extends beyond the social sciences; humanities also often advance micro-perspectives. Most anthropologists are experts on specific countries and regions, and so are many political scientists. Our snapshot of articles in leading African Studies journals strongly supports this claim (Table 1): 85 percent of all articles are country case studies, and one-third examine the micro-level. A tiny minority (7.6 percent) takes into account a broader picture, such as Africa as a whole or subregions. Broad views are rare, not only in geographic terms but also across time. Only 21 percent consider a period of more than ten years. 8 Only two articles (3 percent) combine the big picture with the longue durée, of which one includes African authors (Twagiramungu et al., 2019). Comparisons with other world regions are practically absent. How can we know whether something is specific to Africa if we do not compare it to the rest of the world?
Lamenting the lack of long-term, cross-country, and regional perspectives requires qualification. Micro-perspectives and specific focuses are necessary. The second of the challenges discussed in this article criticised sweeping statements on “Africa.” Generalisation makes sense only when it also considers differences and nuances. But it is costly to ignore the big pictures – remaining fixated on specific topics and countries and, arguably even more so, on current affairs, blinds us to general trends. I argued above that the massive improvements have rarely been discussed in African Studies, though they are very well documented (Basedau, 2019; see also Rosling et al., 2018). Finding the causes of progress has huge potential benefits, both in terms of painting a fairer and more accurate picture of the region and in terms of providing evidence on how to further improve conditions in the forty-nine countries of sub-Saharan Africa.
The Case for Comparative African Studies
Comparing – in a reflective and systematic manner – can alleviate many of the challenges I have tried to identify in the previous sections. I call this approach “Comparative African Studies.” Although the label does not matter, it is no coincidence that the term resembles the concept of CAS. Different concepts of CAS exist (see Ahram et al., 2018; Basedau and Köllner, 2007). In order to add value, I argue that CAS (and also its African variant) should be more than conventional Area Studies “with an adjective.” Instead, I propose conducting Comparative Area (and African) Studies in a way that combines rigorous theoretical and methodological approaches with the context-sensitivity, in-depth knowledge, and explorative openness of Area Studies. “Comparative” in this sense stands for the notion of systematic empirical testing, which necessarily includes comparison, either qualitative or quantitative (or both). The attribute “Area” stands for the in-depth knowledge and context-sensitivity of country and area experts and should be valued for its inductive and exploratory nature, which exploits knowledge on empirical specifics. In the previous sections, I discussed some of the benefits of controlled comparisons and related methods. In the following, I will summarise the ways in which Comparative Area and African Studies can be useful (Table 2).
Challenges of African Studies and Potential Benefits of Comparative African Studies.
First, comparison can also help us overcome a one-sided, outside (particularly Western) view. If we compare – or, better, combine – different perspectives, we may be able to provide a more nuanced picture. Contradicting views can be put to the test, revealing what better matches multi-faceted realties. This comparison will probably show that there is no strict juxtaposition between “African” and “Western” views. What we need is a diversity of views, not just in terms of the origins of scholars. Given the domination of those looking from the outside in, more diversity will nevertheless require strengthening African views, which will require more resources, better institutions, and the right incentives to do research. Second, and probably as a result, Comparative African Studies will be useful to correct the often undifferentiated and mostly negative views on Africa. Comparing different African countries and subnational units of analysis will quickly reveal many differences along with more positive examples and promising trends.
Third, by adding “comparative” to “African Studies” or “Area Studies,” we can also strengthen a field in which social sciences still form the minority, at least in the German university landscape. We need to combine the in-depth knowledge and inductive power of disciplines such as anthropology with the focus on causal explanations pursued by some scholars within the social sciences. Different perspectives create a more complete picture.
Fourth, interestingly, and as argued above, the “causal revolution” in economics and political science – as well as geo-referencing data below the national level – has had the side effect of marginalising cross-country studies, ranging from controlled comparison to classical multi-variate regressions. Such studies have become unfashionable and, even worse, difficult to publish in leading journals, as they can rarely identify causal relationships. This has partly blinded us to the big picture and the longue durée. I have argued above that we need such generalising, even at the expense of causality, as part of the process of scientific production. Approaches incorporating the longue durée will also greatly help us avoid unduly negative views on Africa, as argued above as well.
Consider, for instance, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on political stability or other social phenomena in Africa. A comparative perspective can relate to many different disciplines and topics, including the study of social life, the economy, and politics. Case studies on the health-related, economic, social, and political effects will generate a set of insights and promising hypotheses for general relationships, including potential consequences that purely theory-based reasoning might overlook. Varying levels of restrictions in countering the pandemic can be compared in order to identify systematic links between effects. There can be systematic comparative data collection on infection rates and government responses, as well as on the possible economic and political competition – and related discourses – that have resulted from them. Comparative and single-case studies can use “real-time process-tracing” to track the developments in selected countries – for instance, “typical” cases or those that are exceptionally (un)successful in dealing with the pandemic. Natural experiments can capitalise on differences between and within countries regarding infection rates and government responses. Data collection on the whole of the region as well as all information, analyses, and conclusions can be compared to developments in other world regions. The long-term effects will first become visible a few years down the line, but we might systematically prepare to capture relevant information and questions in our research designs. Of course, we cannot expect that such studies will be systematically connected, but many opportunities for fruitful co-operation exist.
The list of potential benefits of Comparative African Studies might not be exhaustive. However, finally, even a benevolent reader may ask how all of this can be achieved. For one, it is necessary to have more resources for African Studies, certainly in Germany but probably elsewhere as well, not to mention particularly in Africa itself. A second challenge is how to put the multi-disciplinary, multi-method character of the propagated approach into practice. Are Africanists from now on supposed to master all methods and be truly interdisciplinary? This seems unrealistic and might not even be desirable. However, structural improvements can be made; for instance, teams of scholars working together must acknowledge each other’s strengths and their own shortcomings and biases – this, I believe, is the only way that true interdisciplinary co-operation can work.
At the same time, everybody can bring something to the table. It might be especially worthwhile to engage in a mixed-methods approach we might call a “sequential nested research design” (see e.g. Lieberman, 2005). As outlined for the study of the effects of COVID-19, at an initial stage of research, anthropological and other qualitative approaches can use induction to generate hypotheses. These can be put to the test in large-N samples. Building on their results, we can test the underlying, theoretically plausible causal mechanisms in experiments. Typical and deviant cases, selected according to the large-N results, can bring back in qualitative methods. Process-tracing can detect whether the hypothesised mechanisms actually play out in typical cases according to quantitative research. An inductive study of deviant cases can unearth additional variables and complex interactions that were not tested before. Once we have generated new questions, these variables can be fed back to quantitative analysis, which can show whether these variables matter for all cases. The sequence of deduction and induction can be repeated in further rounds. This is, of course, not the only way to collaborate. Scholars can use only a selection of methodological opportunities of course. Single-method studies are and will remain useful. The main challenge is how to co-ordinate different efforts between disciplines and scholars. Let’s get to it.
Footnotes
Notes
Author Biography
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