African Studies, Global Studies, and Disciplinary Positioning

I make my contribution to this symposium on African studies and the challenge of the global in the twenty-first century as a graduate student and scholar from a discipline that favors generalization. Participation in the symposium has given me the opportunity to reflect on what it means to be an Africa-focused scholar in the era of global studies with my particular disciplinary positionality. I am currently a PhD candidate in political science at Indiana University. As a discipline, political science favors generalizability and parsimony more than specificity and complexity. Building on what James Delehanty emphasized in his symposium contribution, I see total compatibility between my disciplinary focus and geographical specialization; however, some prominent voices in my discipline do not share this perspective. In the context of these disciplinary tensions and the emergence of global studies, I argue that the attention to detail and complexity that area-studies scholars explore produces knowledge that is essential to the project of global studies. In addition, I assert that scholarship in area studies can both challenge and enrich knowledge produced by political science.

Though the mainstream of my discipline does not prioritize area studies, I came to the discipline with an area-studies focus. In 2004, when I graduated from Whitworth College, I was intent on pursuing a professional focus on sub-Saharan Africa. In the year that followed, I hoped to be assigned to a volunteer program in Kenya, but instead I was assigned to volunteer in the Indian state of Kerala. This was disappointing at the time, but having the opportunity to live in South Asia was invaluable in many respects and now serves as a point of comparison to sub-Saharan Africa. After my volunteer work in Kerala concluded, I wanted to remain focused, professionally and intellectually, on sub-Saharan Africa. I subsequently enrolled in a master’s program in development studies at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where I opted to take a full-year course on African politics outside of the department of development studies. This course provided a counterpoint to my development-studies courses, which focused on the highly contested concept of development and the broad range of theories and interventions that had not, to date, brought about a clear understanding of why development occurs. Studying African politics alongside development studies allowed me to draw insightful connections between the general themes of the development-studies courses and the actual experiences of countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

After taking my degree at SOAS, I moved to Washington, DC, where, after months of job searching, I found a position working on Central and West African programs at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), where I worked for more than four years. I had the opportunity to travel to West Africa and to build relationships with colleagues and civil-society partners in Nigeria, Guinea Bissau, Mali, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, and Togo. The experience of working with African partners actively seeking to advance democracy and democratic values in their respective countries was invaluable. NDI, in its programs around the world, seeks funding to establish a presence in a given country to support the long-term project of advancing democratic development. However, the donor community that funds most of NDI’s programs to strengthen democratic institutions focuses on short-term programs with great ambitions. In this time-condensed environment, I became interested in taking a longer view in thinking about political change on the continent. This interest led me to pursue a PhD in political science. Through my time in DC and my work with NDI, I learned to speak the language of policy relevance and frame the importance of NDI’s work in Central and West Africa in policy-relevant terms, which were often framed around contemporary concerns about security and stability. As Mamadou Diouf has emphasized in his contribution to this symposium, I agree that it is problematic that in contemporary academic circles, the global is often tightly linked to an orientation toward policy. As I reflect on the meaning of pursuing a focus on African...