AFRICA AND THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Abstract

This article examines what it calls Africa’s International Relations (IR) historiography, an assessment of African scholars’ contribution to the study of IR’s history and discipline. I do this based on the myth surrounding IR’s historiography, the rather limited role of African contributions and a set of criteria teased out of Schmidt and Bell’s works on the writing IR. While they acknowledge Hoffmann’s IR as an American Social Science, they suggest that a field’s historiography must highlight obscured perspectives, researchers that self-consciously profess IR as their discipline and institutions that contribute to the development of the discipline. Although African IR scholars meet some of these criteria, including institutions and scholars that self-profess as IR scholars, the American hegemony and its European competitor cum accomplice in the field greatly influence African scholars writings and the practices they adopt in the study of international relations. While African scholars bring African perspectives on global affairs to bare on the IR that they do, they mostly respond to theoretical, methodological and practical tones set elsewhere in doing so, some even countering these dominant views from “imported” theories, without necessarily developing African-oriented, philosophically grounded study on IR from the African perspective. Consequently, while African contributions to the discipline and history of IR appear marginal, African IR writers can expand their impacts by exploring the discipline of History – a view representing the eclectic nature of IR – and draw on African history and events to provide philosophical, theoretical and empirical insights to African IR study. While the postcolonial theory is an instance of such reflection, African IR scholars will make significant contributions to the field by introspection rather than reliance on Western-oriented canons.