Recentering Africa in International Relations: Beyond Lack, Peripherality, and Failure.

• Author: de Heredia, Marta Iniguez

The discipline of International Relations (IR) is currently witnessing a sustained critique geared towards exposing the parochial origins of its epistemic orientation, namely Eurocentrism. As a system of knowledge production, Eurocentrism establishes Europe as the key referential figure in world history, from which all non-Western experiences and events are derived and subsequently hierarchized in their temporal and political significance. (1) Nowhere is this more apparent than in the discourses, practices, and images that construct Africa's place in the international arena as a foil against the alleged civilizational superiority of the West. Some of the few ways in which IR conventionally conceives of Africa are either recurring to the paradigm of development or conducting performance-driven comparisons of political institutions based on a Western idea of statehood. It is thus that the continent "is never allowed to be a contingency, or value in itself, but as a product of a narcissistic obsession with its difference and alterity [...] these narratives never allow Africa to be complex, layered, nuanced, or differentiated" (p. 4).

The edited volume under discussion therefore writes against such modes of knowledge production in IR and general Africanist scholarship that continue to portray Africa as non-integral, marginal, and peripheral to the international. To give an overview, the contributions of this book cover three broad topics. Primarily, the already mentioned critique of the epistemic project of IR, and alternatives to thinking Africa with and beyond it, is an undercurrent in all pieces (particularly Wai, Bird, Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Iniguez de Heredia). The historical institutionalization of sovereignty and statehood and their effects on the political subjectivity of Africans constitutes the volume's second pillar (Wai, Niang, Gruffyd Jones). Thirdly, contemporary issues of the continent are reinterpreted from a perspective that takes the African experience as central to understanding the international dimensions of, for instance, land grabbing, development, or nation-building (Gill, Matthews, Kolia). In contrast to existing IR books about Africa--of which there are still very few respectable contributions--this volume offers an alternative by giving voice to critical scholars with deep personal and professional ties to the continent. Moreover, it is distinguishable from its peers in that the contributors succeed in depicting the...