Course Description

The patterns of Africa’s interaction with the rest of the world are unique. Its people have had to
contend with acute internal and external pressures which have stretched and shaped the continent’s
systems overtime. While some of the pressures have undermined state institutions and thus retarded
their capacity to underpin human flourishing, others have served as a source of institutional innovations,
resilience and creative adjustment. Ordinarily, if the normal narrative of African fragility were anything
to go by, one would have expected the continent to have been reduced to state of anarchy. The fact
that this has not happened calls for a deeper and nuanced interrogation of the sources, nature and
dynamics of the balance of forces the continent has had to contend with. By and large, however, the
continent’s peoples and institutions are yet to master the management of the external pressures and
by extension their impact on human security. This course is meant to stimulate critical reflection and
discussion of Africa’s pattern of interaction with external systems and in the process trigger bold and
imaginative ideas about how disruptive pressures can be attenuated and eliminated at best and in the
process enhance as well as amplify the harnessing of beneficial pressures. The course thus explores the
international relations of Africa from historical, theoretical, and geopolitical perspectives.