MSc Politics of Africa

In this module students will learn how to broadly orient themselves to the history of Sub-Saharan Africa from the pre-colonial era to the present day while critically evaluating central theories and concepts from comparative politics, and political sociology, and be able to demonstrate their uses and limits in relation to understanding Sub-Saharan Africa.

This module is designed to provide a general introduction to problems, approaches and debates in social science methodologies (broadly understood). The aim is to make MSc students familiar with prominent methodological angles and language(s), to provide both a solid grounding in the key issues and a critical understanding of them.

This module examines the international politics of sub-saharan Africa since independence. It provides historical grounding in central ideas and African campaigns, against slavery, colonialism that secured the independence of the continent, and then considers how independent African states dealt with the context that faced them: considering conflict and cooperation between African states, their insertion into the international order and their efforts to navigate and contest that order. In the second part of the module the emphasis shifts in the period since the end of the Cold War, considering increased Western military and broader political intervention in Africa since the 1990s, and African efforts to reckon with Western 'monopoly diplomacy' both through the search for 'African solutions' in regional and continental bodies including the African Union, and through relations with rising powers including Russia and China.

This dissertation enables the students to work on a research topic in relation to their chosen major. They will learn how to approach the topic they have chosen from an academic angle, under the supervision of a member of staff. The dissertation is normally written over the summer period and submitted in September.

This module will examine how the primary functions of the sovereign state such as governance and security and the most visible manifestations of state security, war and militarism, both construct and are sustained by specific masculinities and femininities. By exploring feminist theoretical interventions on normative understandings of security, the connections between feminist knowledge production, policy influencing and praxis will be articulated.

In this module, you will gain: an understanding of African political thought and debate throughout the period leading to decolonisation, the years of independence, and reflective thought some 50 years after independence. Application of learning to the understanding of contemporary African politics. Appreciation of different strands of political thought in different parts of Africa, their relationship to distinct histories and cultures, and their efforts towards a unified body of thought in the face of analyses and diagnoses of contemporary globalisation. And the ability to problematise African political thought by means of both critique and contextualisation.

Cities are fascinating and central sites of political life, often at the sharp end of new political ideas and movements, struggles between order and disorder, violence, resistance and creativity. This course focuses on political life in African cities as a way to understand core aspects of modern political life across the continent. The course is organised around three themes: 1. Cities as sites of contested imaginations of the state. 2. Cities as sites of intense and often conflictual state-society relations; and 3. Cities as sites of creative political life.

This module examines historical and contemporary trends of social rupture and reconfiguration in the African Great Lakes region, focusing on four countries: Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Beginning with key political, social and economic dimensions from the pre-colonial and colonial periods, this module adopts a comparative approach in analysing key societal dimensions that shape modern politics in central Africa - a region of immense dynamism and volatility, with major repercussions for the continent as a whole.

This module looks at four countries in Southern Africa which saw bitter stuggles against settler-colonialism won by avowedly radical popular movements (South Africa, Zimbabwe, Angola and Mozambique) and four of their neighbours which won independence earlier and without fighting (Bostwana, Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania). This course seeks to understand both where the politics of rule and resistance come from historically (thinking about 'post-socialism' and the effects of organising revolutionary guerilla warfare on the political culture of movements that win their wars) and contemporary developments in these political systems.

This module outlines the development of African Philosophy in the 20th century, a discourse that hinges on the following questions: does philosophy exist in Africa? What are the specific qualities that distinguish it from Western philosophy? We will survey the trends in African philosophical thought classified under the rubrics of ethnophilosophy", "nationalist-ideological philosophy", "sage philosophy", and "professional philosophy", and discuss specific concepts with philosophical reference or resonance, such as race, time, but also development or art. Several classes will be devoted to influential contemporary philosophers, in particular Paulin Hountondji, Kwame Anthony Appiah, V.-Y. Mudimbe, Henry Odera Oruka, and Kwasi Wiredu."

This module outlines the development of African Philosophy in the 20th century, a discourse that hinges on the following questions: does philosophy exist in Africa? What are the specific qualities that distinguish it from Western philosophy? We will survey the trends in African philosophical thought classified under the rubrics of ethnophilosophy", "nationalist-ideological philosophy", "sage philosophy", and "professional philosophy", and discuss specific concepts with philosophical reference or resonance, such as race, time, but also development or art. Several classes will be devoted to influential contemporary philosophers, in particular Paulin Hountondji, Kwame Anthony Appiah, V.-Y. Mudimbe, Henry Odera Oruka, and Kwasi Wiredu."

This module discusses the question how language is related to the conceptions of identity and society in the African context. The module offers different perspectives on the relation between language and identity, and on the dynamics of language use in Africa.

This course offers an exploration of the formation of diasporas and their cultural politics. It looks at how diasporic subjectivities are formed through gendered aesthetic practices and performances, which can take on and signify religious, cultural, political meanings, which are in turn constantly negotiated, hybridised and re-fashioned across bodies, times and spaces.

What is migration? Is this the “age of migration”? What is Diaspora and what challenges do diasporic communities bring to modern political constructions such as the nation-state, national “imagined” communities, citizenship and their associated metaphysics of sedentarism? This course will explore these issues by critically engaging with the ways in which migration and diaspora have been understood historically and in modern and contemporary times. Different theories, approaches, and disciplinary angles will be introduced and discussed. We will also consider what de-colonising approaches to migration and diaspora might look like. By drawing on established and less charted bodies of work on migration studies, diaspora and identity, transnationalism, postcolonial and de-colonial studies the course offers an interdisciplinary approach to the emergence of diasporas, the reformulation of 'home' and the simultaneous instability and reinforcement of nation-states.

How might we understand art as a site of politics?  In this module we consider how visual artists and art collectives have taken positions on political change in Africa since the early twentieth century, spanning from anti-colonial resistance and the struggle against apartheid to the Arab Spring and Rhodes Must Fall movement.  Through case studies ranging from early portrait photography in West Africa to recent live art protests, we think through aesthetic approaches to the political.

This module explores economic development in post-colonial Sub-Saharan Africa, bringing together macroeconomic and microeconomic perspectives. The overarching aim is to analyse and unpack key dimensions of the processes of economic development across Sub-Saharan African countries taking a critical and pluralist approach.

This course is intended to provide both an introduction to queer theory, as well as to engage with the question of its relevance in contemporary Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. This course will use struggles for sexual self-determination as a prism through which to consider broader questions about the constitution of modernity, the proliferation of identities, rights and claims for justice, the consolidation and deconstruction of postcolonial national identities, the aspirations and anxieties of postcolonial elites, etc. These questions will be studied contextually, with topics in many weeks focusing on a single area case study, or a comparison of two or more country-contexts.

This is a critical gender studies course that offers post graduate students an understanding of the diverse ways in which African feminisms have evolved across the African continent. The course proceeds from both a gender and queer theory perspective to unpacking how African feminist interventions have ruptured state/society relations organised around gendered, racialised and classed hierarchies. This course is not designed to offer a comprehensive understanding of the African continent neither does it attempt to offer full coverage of the African continent. What it does is provide students with the theoretical tools to analyse activisms, research and policy making institutions set up to challenge power and resisting injustice. The pedagogical approach to the course is centred on providing practical examples to illustrate the evolution, reversals and contestations that have shaped feminist politics and activisms in Africa.

This module is concerned with South Africa's tumultuous twentieth-century history. It commences with the reconstruction of the South African state following the end of the South African War (1899-1902), and examines the respective origins and consequences of formal segregation (1910s - 1930s) and apartheid (1940s - 1980s). It is especially concerned with the ways in which ordinary Africans negotiated daily life within the strictures of these forms of state repression. A significant part of the module is concerned with the emergence of African nationalism, resistance to apartheid, and the collapse of the apartheid state at the end of the twentieth century, a conflict that engulfed all of southern Africa.

This module explores Gender as a category of historical analysis based on an exploration of case studies from the histories of Asia, Africa and the Middle East. It will analyse gender in relation to other concepts, such as class, race, ethnicity, empire, coloniality, sexuality, etc., and explore how these categories shaped the historical experiences of individuals with various gender identities on the one hand and the histories of empires and nations on the other hand.

This module aims at conceptualising a new law and development initiative for Africa by critically engaging with the traditional “law and development movement” and identifying its methodological shortcomings with respect to Africa. It examines the scope and limitations of law as an instrument of development and explores what contributions can law, legal theory and legal institutions make towards the realisation of human, economic and socio-political development in Africa.

The module aims to explore historical and contemporary dimensions of the relationship between international law and colonialism.

This course will investigate the evolving nature of security governance and risks in the 21st century, with particular attention to emerging threats in the realms of nuclear weapons, non-state terrorism, climate change, energy, and food security, as well as emerging forms of security governance in the domains of surveillance and policing.

This module offers historical, theoretical and empirical perspectives on the nature and causes of conflict and its impact of on social and economic development in Africa, Asia and the Middle East over the past century, as well as memory and justice responses to violence. It emphasises the crucial linkages of conflict, memory and justice, in particular the prevalence of unaddressed or manipulated memories of violence, historical grievance and impunity as causes of further conflict.

This module is for students with no prior knowledge of quantitative methods used in social research. Students will learn basic quantitative techniques used in social research and conduct the corresponding analyses using the R statistical package, as well as recognise applications of basic quantitative methods in social science journal articles. The topics covered will be: descriptive statistics; graphs; hypothesis testing for sample means and proportions; two-way and three-way tables; simple linear regression; multiple linear regression; and binary logistic regression.

The purpose of this course is to examine the effects of political factors on economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.