The imperative of African perspectives on International Relations (IR)

Abstract

This article argues that location, as both geography and epistemology, can be a place of innovation in the discipline of international relations (IR). Specifically, it suggests that a re-appropriation of IR as a product of a global history in which the Global South, in general, and Africa, in particular, played an important role can help displace the moral and historical centrality of Western theory where it has failed to give credence to ‘peripheral’ experience and social thought. This belief coincides with a commonsense according to which the production of knowledge is by necessity inseparable from the intellectual conventions, traditions and lineages of the place of production. This means that African universities in particular have the opportunity to generate new perspectives in IR based on the analyses of the historical events that marked the life of the continent. In this manner, thinking and teaching IR in Africa would consist of revisiting the received truths about the evolution of the international order and society by revising their historical underpinnings, where necessary, and by interrogating the ‘unit-ideas’ that structure disciplinary impulses.