Conference papers
This page provides copies of papers presented at conferences and workshops under the Working Group's auspices.
Working Group funded workshop: 'Post-post' independence? African political thought, contemporary protest and the international
For further information please see the workshop programme.
Thursday 19 July - Friday 20 July 2012, Queen Mary University of London
Rebellion against the state to obtain one's rights: Discourse of rights between instrumentalisation and local concerns - Ole Martin Gaasholt (SOAS) (105 KB)
Discourse, identity and protest politics in the Somali Horn of Africa: the case of Somaliland - Peter Chonka (University of Edinburgh) (251 KB)
Parrhesia and the history of the Public in Angola - Paulo Faria (University of Kent)
The triple post in Uganda: Thoughts on independence and patterns of critique - Franziska Dübgen (Goethe University) and Stefan Skupien (Humboldt University) (143KB)
Rescuing African Bodies: Western Celebrities, Human Rights and Protest in Africa - Patrica Daley (Oxford University) (279 KB)
Who's heard of the African Spring? - Clive Gabay (Queen Mary University of London)
BISA-ISA Joint international conference
The BISA Africa and IS Working Group had four panels at the conference in June.
Wednesday 20 June – Friday 22 June 2012, Edinburgh
Session 6 Panel 16: South African in the Global Political Economy
Building with BRICS: A Burgeoning Dynamic for South Africa? - Lucky Asuelime and Abel Jethro (KwaZulu-Natal) (484 KB)
The incongruent faces of a middle power: South Africa's emergence in international development - Helen Yanacopulos (Open University) (132 KB)
What's left of 'the left' in Post-Apartheid South Africa? - Stephen Hurt (Oxford Brookes) (260 KB)
Towards an International Political Economy of Africa's 'Renaissance': for whom? - Timothy Shaw (Aalborg & Massachusetts) (143 KB)
Session 10, Panel 5: Governing and contesting African environments
Environmental mainstreaming and post-sovereign governance in Tanzania - Carl Death (Aberystwyth) (170 KB)
Mining Cooperatives: re-invigorating small-scale mining participation and benefit in Rwanda? - Rachel Perks (Reading) (288 KB)
Environmental Governance: Interpreting the Events of 1989 via Climate Change - Alice Bullard
Is the Peace by the State Enough? Understanding the Dialectics of the Amnesty Programme in Nigeria's Niger Delta - Cyril Obi
Session 11 Panel 8: African agency in international politics
Africa to send troops, food parcels to UK as riots spread - Karen Smith (Stellenbosch) (132 KB)
UK Policy and African Agency: Whose Agency? Whose Interests? - Tom Cargill (Chatham House) (178 KB)
Neoliberalism's pasts and futures in Africa and implications for development trajectories - Scarlett Cornelissen (Stellanbosch)
A question of agency: Africa in international politics - William Brown (Open University) (200 KB)
BISA 2011 – Manchester Conference Centre
The BISA Africa and International Studies Working Group has four sponsored panels at BISA annual conference (see www.bisa.ac.uk for more details)
27 – 29 April 2011
Panel 1: Advancing the neoliberal cultural transformation in Africa: Sites, actors, leverages
The neoliberal legacy of the Paris Declaration: Different responses, practices and outcomes of implementation in Tanzania - Sojin Lim (IDPM) (328 KB)
Governing Health Risk by Buying Behaviour - Sophie Harman (City) (264 KB)
The commodification of misery:
Markets for healing, markets for sickness1 - Nadine Beckmann (Oxford) (240 KB)
Panel 2: The Emerging Post-Washington Consensus: What Impact for International Aid and Domestic Policies in Africa?
Ethiopia and the Search for Alternative Exemplars of Development - Elsje Fourie (Trento) (331 KB)
Democratizing Development? The Politics of Good Governance and Development Policy Reform in Ghana - Lord Mawuko-Yevugah (Athabasca)
Can Development Corridors Now Produce Sustainable Domestic Outcomes in Mozambique? - Rachel Tate (Leicester) (534 KB)
Privatizating the African State: uneasy process and limited outcomes. The case of the cotton sector in Mali - Isaline Bergamaschi (Warwick) (466 KB)
Panel 3: Africa and IR Theory 1
Neopatrimonialism, personal rule and other wretched concepts: the ethnographic gaze of contemporary IR - Branwen Gruffydd Jones (Goldsmiths)
Agency, African states and IR theory - David Williams (City) (177 KB)
The manacles of (uneven and combined) development: can we be released? - Meera Sabaratnam (LSE) (326 KB)
Perceptions of 'success' and 'failure' in the development community: the cases of Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau - Teresa de Almeida Cravo (Cambridge)
Panel 4: Africa and IR Theory 2
Foucault and Africa: Governmentality, IR theory, and the limits of advanced liberalism - Carl Death (Aberystwyth) (181 KB)
The researcher as protagonist: how to make the most out of difference - Julia Gallagher (Royal Holloway)
Coloniality and the Renaissance Expansion of International Society - Jeremy Larkins (Leeds)
Building states and civil societies in Africa: Liberal interventions and global governmentality.
Workshop. Department of International Politics Aberystwyth University, UK
26 - 27 January 2011
The Political Economy of Citizenship and Civil Society in Africa - Emmanuel Remi Aiyede (Ibadan) (199 KB)
Governmentality and the fuzzy edges of African postcolonial civil society - Kudzai Matereke (New South Wales) (197 KB)
"Civil Society" and the Liberal Project in Ghana and Sierra Leone - David Williams (City) and Tom Young (132 KB)
The construction of “civil society” under the spell of autochthony informed land rights conflicts - Morten Bøås (FAFO) (187 KB)
Escaping statebuilding: the uncivilised actions of solidarity and grassroots networks in Congo - Marta Iniguez de Heredia (LSE) (389 KB)
Companies, communities and local security governance: Disciplinary paternalism, participatory community engagement and indirect rule - Jana Honke (Freie Universität Berlin) (577 KB)
Governmentality and Counterterrorism – Doing “Peace and Security” in Kenya - Jan Bachmann (Gothenburg)
The public of public health: in search of “civil society” within contemporary malaria control in Africa - Uli Beisel (LSHTM) and Rene Gerrets (UVA) (453 KB)
Civilising African cities: international housing policy from colonial to neoliberal times - Branwen Gruffydd Jones (Goldsmiths) (108 KB)
Africa and the Historical Sociology of 'the international' workshop
26 May 2010, The Open University, Camden, London
Aid, sovereignty and history: colonial antecedents and contemporary aid relations - William Brown (Open University) (200 KB)
The Imperatives of Uneven and Combined Development: Dynastic Centralization and Official Nationalism in Ethiopia - Fouad Makki (Cornell University)
Is the 'Development' in 'uneven and combined development' the 'Development' in 'Millennium Development Goals'? - Meera Sabaratnam (LSE) (185 KB)
Uneven and Combined Development: Contested Historical Transitions and the African Crisis - E.A. Brett (LSE) (20 KB)
BISA Annual Conference 2010, Edinburgh
29 March - 1 April 2010
New forms of live from the debris of the Congolese State - Patience Kabamba (Emory University) (161 KB)
State-building challenged: unarmed resistance as a form of reinventing the future - Marta Iniguez de Heredia (LSE) (286 KB)
The Horn of Africa as a security complex - Berouk Mesfin (Institute for Security Studies) (108 KB)
The theory and practice of empowerment in Africa - Karen Treasure and Richard Gibb (University of Plymouth) (202 KB)
BISA Annual Conference 2009, University of Leicester
14-16 December 2009
Power and Protests: Representing Civil Society in South Africa at the 2002 Johannesburg Summit - Carl Death (Dublin City) (240 KB)
Disciplining anti-poverty: The Global Call to Action (GCAP) against Poverty and the MDGs in Malawi - Clive Gabay (Open University) (135 KB)
MEND me: violence as empowerment in the Niger Delta - Morten Boas (Oslo, Institute for Applied International Studies) (633 KB)
Urbicide in Sudan: International opposition or complicity? - Mark Duffield (Bristol) (300 KB)
Selling Security or Engendering Conflict? Transnational Private Security Actors in Nigeria's Oil-rich Niger Delta - Cyril Obi (Nordiska Afrikainstituet, Uppsala) (120 KB)
Understanding the Cariforum-EU Economic Partnership Agreement - Tony Heron (Sheffield) (200 KB)
Economic Partnership Agreements: The Southern African experience - Stephen Hurt (Oxfrod Brookes) (130 KB)
The internationalisation of the state in southern Africa through regionalism: the SADC and the EPAs within an emerging 'Aid for Trade' agenda - Stephen Buzdugan (Manchester) (340 KB)
Africa International: agency and interdependency in a changing world
9 October 2009
Chatham House, Royal Institute of International Affairs, London
Canada, the G8, and Africa: the rise and decline of a hegemonic project? - David Black (202 KB)
Why there are differences between policy and academic world - David Frost (109 KB)
Britain 'doing good' in Africa: what opportunities for African agency? - Julia Gallagher (35 KB)
Towards a critical geopolitics of China's engagement with African development - Marcus Power and Giles Mohan (157 KB)
This paper will be published in the journal Geopolitics in 2010.
Transnational Security and African States - Cyril Obi (68 KB)
Solidarity intervention: Emerging trends in AU's interventions in African crisis - Thomas Kwasi Tieku (78 KB)
The Responsibility to Protect and African International Society - Paul D Williams (61 KB)
New Directions in IR and Africa
9 July 2008
Hosted by Politics and International Studies Department, The Open University, Milton Keynes
Workshop Programme (21 KB)
Social development and international relations: reconsidering the aid relationship - Dr William Brown (81 KB)
Migration as reterritorialization: migrant movement, sovereignty and authority in contemporary Southern Africa - Scarlett Cornelissen (588 KB)
Politics of (non-)integration and Shadow Regionalism in Africa - Emmanuel Fanta (96 KB)
Social Forces in the EU's 'Post-Washington' Consensus Africa Policy: The Case of South Africa - Stephen Hurt and Magnus Ryner (137 KB)
The geopolitics of China's engagement with African development - Marcus Power and Giles Mohan (126 KB)
Has Africa got anything to say1? African contributions to the theoretical development of International Relations: a preliminary investigation - Karen Smith (199 KB)
South Africa's experience of the Trade, Development and Cooperation Agreement (TDCA) with the European Union from 1995 to 2005 - Oscar van Heerden (160 KB)
BISA Annual Conference 2008, University of Exeter
15-17 December 2008
Africa and Global Relations/Studies: Lessons From/For the Continent (80 KB) - Timothy M. Shaw (University of the West Indies)
A Funeral for a Friend: Contested Citizenship and Belonging in the Liberian Civil War (106 KB) - Morten Boas (FAFO, Norway)
Engaging with the World: Corporate South Africa and the Rise of Non-OECD Multinationals in Global Economic Governance (132 KB) - Antoinette Valsamakis (Birmingham)
Reforming EU-Africa Relations: A Case Study of the EU and SADC (228 KB) - Sophia Price (Open University)
A New Scramble for Africa: The Struggle on the Continent to Set the Terms of Global Health (136 KB) - Sandra J. MacLean (SFU, Canada)
Ethiopia's Hegemonial Role: Setting Standards? (160 KB) - Dustin Dehéz (Dusseldorf Institute on Foreign and Security Policy)
BISA Annual Conference 2007, University of Cambridge
17-19 December 2007
Thinking Beyond Development: The future of post-development theory in Southern Anfrica (120 KB) - Stefan Andreasson (Queen's University Belfast)
A Critical Analysis of Regionalism as a Development Strategy in southern Africa: beyond Institutional Explanations of Failure of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) (216 KB) - Stephen Buzdugan (Manchester University)
Framing the Orange: Socialisation of the Global Norm Set of Transboundary Co-operation in the Orange River basin within the frame of desecuritisation (183 KB) - Inga Jacobs (St. Andrews University)
