140219 PS EU-Africa Politics: Postcolonial Collaborations and Negotiations (2019W)

In this pro-seminar, we engage with EU-Africa-Politics, which include free trade agreements in form of EPAs (Economic Partnership Agreements), security cooperation such as SSRs (Security Sector Reform) or education programs. Since the “summer of migration” 2015, EU (development) politics have increasingly focused on African countries; 2017 was EU's "Africa Year". In this regard, an increased focus on “migration control” can be observed: Development-, trade as well as security policies target the control of migration between the African continent and the EU as well as between African countries. In doing so, they reinforce colonial borders dating back to the 19th century.

Against this backdrop, in this course we focus on EU-Africa-Politics and postcolonial power constellations. In the first part, the relation between the EU and ACP-countries (African, Caribbean and Pacific group of states) is discussed with regard to colonialism. On the basis of primary and secondary literature, we engage with perspectives that frame EU-Africa-Politics as “neo-colonial” (Nkrumah 1965; Langan 2018) or as “centre- periphery”- related (Rodney 1982).
The second part focuses on the broad spectrum of EU-Africa-Politics. On the basis of discussions of required reading and short presentations of extra reading on the part of students we discuss the institutional setting (Cotonou agreement, Joint Africa-EU Strategy (JAES)) as well as cooperation such as trade agreements, migration cooperation or security policies. A guiding question consists in how notions of “partnership”, “ownership” or “dialogue” represent new (old) notions of “development” and how they negotiate power relations between the EU and African countries. EU-Africa-Politics shall not only be discussed with regard to collobarations between the actors involved; negotiations also imply the question of how politics are implemented and whether they are contested from the side of African actors, from the Agenda 2063 of the African Union to activist networks like afrique-europe-interact (vgl. https://afrique-europe-interact.net/).
In the third part, students present the concept of their pro-seminar paper. The paper shall contain a freely chosen topic in line with the pro-seminar. The presented concepts present the basis of the final assignment in form of a pro-seminar paper. During the course, students shall practice to choose a topic, formulate a research question and discuss it in form of a written assignment.