About Africa and International Studies

The Africa and International Studies Working Group was formally established in summer 2007. The Group aims to provide a forum in which to bring together a diverse range of scholars to discuss and debate:

substantive issues arising from a study of Africa and ‘the international’;
theoretical and conceptual debates about the relationship between generalities of the discipline of International Studies and African historically-based specificities; and
ideas about the relationship of issues and theory in the pedagogy of International Studies in and of Africa.

Since its inception the group has established an active presence at the BISA annual conference, ISA annual conference, and has organised a number of our own workshops. Previous activities that have attracted research funding include the following:

an ESRC Research Seminar series on 'African Agency in International Politics' in 2011, which resulted in a number of outputs including 'African Agency in International Politics' (Routledge, 2013) edited by William Brown and Sophie Harman.
a BISA and HEA funded series on 'Teaching Africa and International Studies' in 2013.
an ESRC Research Seminar series on UK Africa Policy after Labour in 2014-16, which led to a collection edited by Danielle Beswick, Jonathan Fisher and Stephen R. Hurt, Britain and Africa in the twenty-first century: Between ambition and pragmatism, (Manchester University Press, 2019).