African Affairs, 116/462, 125–139 doi: 10.

1093/afraf/adw071
© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal African Society. All rights reserved
Advance Access Publication 8 December 2016

RESEARCH NOTE
AFRICA AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS:
ASSEMBLING AFRICA, STUDYING THE
WORLD
RITA ABRAHAMSEN*

ABSTRACT
This Research Note contributes to recent debates about Africa’s place
within the discipline of International Relations (IR). It argues that bring-
ing Africa into IR cannot be simply a question of ‘add Africa and stir’, as
the continent does not enter the discipline as a neutral object of study.
Instead, it is already overdetermined and embedded within the politics
and structure of values of the academe, which are in turn influenced in
complex ways by changing geopolitics. The present combination of IR’s
increased awareness of its own Western-centrism and Africa’s position as
the new ‘frontline in the war on terror’ therefore harbours both opportun-
ities and dangers, and bringing Africa into IR involves epistemological and
methodological challenges relating to our object of study and political chal-
lenges relating to the contemporary securitization of Africa. The Research
Note suggests that an assemblage approach offers a productive way of nego-
tiating this encounter between IR and African Studies, making it possible to
study Africa simultaneously as a place in the world and of the world, captur-
ing the continent’s politics and societies as both unique and global.

FROM MIGRATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE and financial expansion, Africa

is at the centre of numerous international crises and opportunities. Yet
the study of Africa stands in an ambivalent and tension-filled relationship
to the discipline of International Relations (IR). While IR claims to study
‘the international’, scholars of Africa routinely accuse the discipline of
sins of omission and misapprehension: IR, they charge, is preoccupied
with great power politics, devoted to understanding the states ‘that make
the most difference’.1 Hence, it mostly ignores and marginalizes Africa,

*Rita Abrahamsen (rita.abrahamsen@uottawa.ca) is professor in the Graduate School of

Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. This Research Note was first
presented at the conference New Political Topographies at the Centre of African Studies at
the University of Edinburgh, and I am grateful to the participants for their comments.
Thanks are also due to Michael C. Williams and Adam Sandor.
1. Kenneth Waltz, Theory of international politics (Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1979), p. 73.

125
126 AFRICAN AFFAIRS

and when the continent makes an occasional IR appearance its treatment

is readily dismissed by Africanists as superficial, erroneous, or Western-
centric.2 From this perspective, IR is a profoundly Western discipline,
unable to capture the historical specificity of the postcolonial African state,
to perceive of difference as anything but deviance from a norm, and there-
fore also unable to capture the continent’s globality. Africa, then, is IR’s
permanent ‘other’, serving to reproduce and confirm the superiority and
hegemony of Western knowledge, epistemologies, and methodologies.
There is much truth to this critique and four decades on Stanley
Hoffman’s 1977 description of IR as ‘an American social science’ remains
a reasonably fair depiction.3 IR is rarely told from the ‘periphery’ and IR
theorizing remains steeped in theories ‘made in the USA’.4 At the same
time, much has changed and like most of the social sciences, IR is becom-
ing more self-reflexive and aware of its parochialism and shortcomings.5
Similarly, African Studies is showing an increasing engagement and rap-
prochement with IR.6 On both sides, there are thus growing efforts at dia-
logue and mutual learning, with ambitions to ‘bring Africa in from the
margins’, to demonstrate the ‘lessons’ IR can learn from Africa and to
include more southern voices in IR.7
This Research Note seeks to contribute to the debate about Africa’s place
within IR but argues that it is not sufficient simply to ‘bring Africa in’ or to
demonstrate the inadequacy or failure of IR theory to capture African real-
ities. While the former approach serves the valuable function of adding a
series of African cases or illustrations to IR, and thus expands our empirical

2. For instructive examples, see Kevin C. Dunn and Timothy M. Shaw (eds), Africa’s chal-
lenge to International Relations theory (Palgrave, London, 2001); Scarlett Cornelissen, Fantu
Cheru and Timothy M. Shaw (eds), Africa and International Relations in the 21st century
(Palgrave, London, 2012); Branwen Gruffydd Jones (ed.), Decolonizing International Relations
(Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 2006).
3. Stanley Hoffman, ‘An American social science: International Relations’, Daedalus 106,1
(1977), pp. 41–60.
4. Ole Wæver and Arlene B. Ticker, ‘Introduction: geocultural epistemologies’, in Arlene B.
Tickner and Ole Waever (eds), International Relations scholarship around the world (Routledge,
London, 2009), p. 1.
5. See Tickner and Wæver, ‘Introduction’; Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney,
International Relations and the problem of difference (Routledge, London, 2004); Didier Bigo
and R.B.J. Walker, ‘Political sociology and the problem of the international’, Millennium 35,
3 (2007), pp. 725–739.
6. See Carl Death, ‘Governmentality at the limits of the international: African politics and
Foucauldian theory’, Review of International Studies 39, 3, (2013), pp. 763–787; Sophie
Harman and William Brown, ‘In from the margins? The changing place of Africa in
International Relations’, International Affairs 89, 1 (2013), pp. 69–87; African Affairs, ‘Virtual
Issue: Africa’s International Relations’, <http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/afrafj/
international_relations_vi.html> (15 June 2016).
7. Harman and Brown speak of ‘bringing Africa in from the margins’. Lemke identifies
‘African lessons for IR’, and a similar sentiment is expressed in Cornelissen, Cheru, and
Shaw. Harman and Brown, ‘In from the margins?’; Douglas Lemke, ‘African lessons for
International Relations research’, World Politics 56, 1 (2003), pp. 114–38; Cornelissen,
Cheru and Shaw, Africa and International Relations.
 AFRICA AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 127

knowledge and horizons, it does not fundamentally change or challenge

deeper assumptions of what constitutes ‘the international’ or theories of the
international. By the same token, while the latter approach of revealing IR’s
Western-centrism and adopting an African perspective on the international
sends a pointed political message about the empire’s ability to ‘write back’,8
this merely replaces one parochialism with another. An African IR would
be just another provincial IR, a substitute or evil twin of a Western IR, and
would do little to facilitate the development of theoretical concepts and fra-
meworks that allow us to theorize the international or the global—wherever
it may be located.
The question of Africa’s place within IR is not then simply a question
of ‘add Africa and stir’. Instead, the question goes to the heart of what it
means to study ‘Africa’ and ‘the international’ and involves complex epis-
temological and methodological issues. It also involves an engagement
with the politics of the academe, our own disciplinary forms of symbolic
capital, as well as their interaction with broader geopolitics. This Research
Note outlines some of these challenges and suggests that an engagement
with international political sociology, and more specifically an assemblage
methodology, offers a productive way of negotiating the meeting between
IR and African Studies by making it possible to study Africa simultan-
eously as a place in the world and of the world, i.e. in a manner that
appreciates its specificity and its globality. By studying Africa from the
ground up, as it is being constantly assembled by a multiplicity of local
and global forces, the continent’s politics and societies can be captured as
both unique and global, as a window on the contemporary world and its
articulation in particular settings.

Africa, the disciplines, and international politics

We cannot understand our objects of study (be they ‘Africa’ or ‘the inter-
national’) outside an appreciation of the disciplines that constituted them
as such, and by implication the question of Africa’s position within IR
requires an engagement with the sociology of the two disciplines, the his-
torically constituted practices that they seek to examine and the relation-
ship between them.
African Studies has arguably always suffered from an inferiority com-
plex,9 and debates about Africa and IR is but one articulation of a long
series of soul-searching exercises of African Studies’ relationship to the

8. The phrase is borrowed from Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds) The
empire writes back: Theory and practice in post-colonial literature (Routledge, London, 1989).
9. The same could possibly be said for IR. See Tim Dunne, Lene Hansen and Colin
Wight ‘The end of International Relations theory?’ European Journal of International Relations
19, 3 (2013), pp. 405–425.
128 AFRICAN AFFAIRS

broader academe. There are few better illustrations of this than the vol-
ume Africa and the disciplines, edited by Robert Bates, V.Y. Mudimbe and
Jean O’Barr.10 The book is billed as a ‘defense for the study of Africa’ and
includes chapters on Africanists’ contributions to a range of disciplines,
including politics, economics, philosophy, and literary studies. In the open-
ing paragraphs the editors narrate an imaginary job interview at a leading
American university. The provost, dean, or departmental chair is interview-
ing a candidate who has conducted the bulk of her research in Africa. She
is asked the question ‘Given that resources are scarce and that I’m trying to
build a top-ranked department, why should I invest in someone who works
on Africa? And ‘What has been the contribution of research in Africa to
this discipline?’ As the editors put it, disciplines reside within departments,
departments dominate universities and the questions thus cut to the core of
the standing of African Studies within the modern university.
Bates, Mudimbe, and O’Barr’s rebuttal is that African Studies has con-
tributed to the disciplines. Their point is fair enough, but the defence
itself acknowledges that Africa is brought to the disciplines and that those
disciplines themselves emerge from elsewhere. African Studies and
Africanists stand on the sidelines; as experts on Africa rather than IR, pol-
itics, or economics, they watch the disciplines go by, making the occa-
sional, if sometimes significant, contribution from the fringes.
This positioning and self-perception of African Studies within the aca-
deme reflect academic politics and the hierarchies of the academic field.
Theory almost always has a higher symbolic capital than the empirical, and
theory building and the production of nomothetic, generalizable insights
command attention and respect within the social sciences, much more so
than empirical approaches centred on idiographic case studies and thick
description characterized as ‘illustrations’ and ‘application of theory’.11 This
structure of value is one important reason why African Studies tend to
occupy the lower echelons of the ivory towers. Conversely, it also helps
explain why Africanists are prone to dismiss generality in favour of specifi-
city as a way on enhancing their own symbolic capital and status. Africanists
pride themselves on their intimate knowledge of place, trading and compar-
ing stories of ‘time spent in the field’. Country expertise is the researcher’s
official insignia, with regional knowledge of East, West, North, or Southern

10. Robert H. Bates, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Jean F. O’Barr, Africa and the disciplines: The
contributions of research in Africa to the social sciences and the humanities (University of Chicago
Press, Chicago Ill., 1993).
11. Jack S. Levy, ‘Explaining events and developing theories: History, Political Science,
and the analysis of International Relations’, in Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman
(eds), Bridges and boundaries: Historians, political scientists and the study of International
Relations (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001); David Szanton (ed.), The politics of knowl-
edge. Area Studies and the disciplines (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2004);
Dunne, Hansen and Wight, ‘The end of International Relations theory?’
 AFRICA AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 129

Africa a possible additional badge of honour. Even as globalization has

destabilized the notion of place as a bounded geographical construct and the
location of African politics has been de-territorialized and stretched across
national borders,12 the Africanist and knowledge about Africa remain tied to
space and symbolic capital arises in large part from country expertise rather
than theory production.
The vexed relationship between IR and African Studies arises in part
from their different forms of symbolic capital, with representatives of both
defending the forms of knowledge that most enhances their own (academic)
status. In this way, the fields are likely to reproduce themselves; to succeed
in either requires new recruits to acquire the requisite forms of symbolic
capital, be it theoretical innovation or field experience.13 The challenge for
African Studies is that its valorization of the idiographic, or the specific,
often phrased in quasi-antagonistic opposition to the general and nomo-
thetic IR, simultaneously reproduces Africanists as just that: experts on
Africa and their specific country rather than on IR, the international or an
issue area. In so doing, Africanists risk ceding the ground, to let others
speak with authority on ‘international affairs’ in Africa, thus also relinquish-
ing the opportunity to share their knowledge, to speak to the discipline of
IR and about the world at large. In this way, Africa’s specificity and exoti-
cism is reproduced and reconfirmed. As an object of study the continent
becomes a place apart, a place for the application of theories, or a source of
raw data, but not a site for the generation of ideas and theoretical insights
that have widespread and general relevance for the world.
The status of African Studies within IR (and the academe more gener-
ally) also has to be understood in the context of the continent’s relative
position of weakness within the international system, and the real and per-
ceived status of Africa within the academe has waxed and waned in cor-
respondence with the continent’s perceived geopolitical importance.
Indeed, the very emergence of African Studies is closely linked to geopol-
itics, as the processes of decolonization gave birth to a spate of new coun-
tries precisely at the time of simmering cold war tensions.14 The various
Area Studies were thus forged in the midst of the bipolar struggle for allies
and influence in newly independent states, and while left-leaning

12. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy’, Theory,
Culture & Society 7 (1990), pp. 295–310; Charles Piot, Remotely global: Village modernity in
West Africa (University of Chicago Press, Chicago Ill., 1999).
13. For a discussion of fieldwork as a form of evidence, see Christopher Cramer, Deborah
Johnston, Charles Oya and John Sender, ‘Research note: Mistakes, crises and research inde-
pendence: The perils of fieldwork as a form of evidence’, African Affairs 116, 458 (2016),
pp. 148–160.
14. For an in-depth analysis of the development of African Studies, see Paul T. Zezela, The
study of Africa (Volume 1): Disciplinary and interdisciplinary encounters (Codesria, Dakar, 2006)
and The study of Africa (Volume 2): Transnational and global engagements (Codesria, Dakar,
2007). On the emergence of Area Studies, see Szanton, The politics of knowledge.
130 AFRICAN AFFAIRS

Africanists sought to promote self-determination and anti-imperialism,

the mainstream of African Studies (and Area Studies more generally) was
closely aligned with the ‘realpolitik’ of the cold war era. Put differently, at
its inception the dominant scholarship and research agendas of African
Studies mapped readily on to the geopolitical concerns of the West.15
This is evident not only in those studies that aligned most crudely with
Western foreign policy objectives but also more broadly in the numerous
analyses of political change and modernization with their underlying fear
that social transformations might spark more radical, socialist demands,
or even revolutions.16
In large part because of this political alignment, Area Studies fell out of
favour as bipolarity came to an end. In its wake, International Studies or
Global Studies were born, and influential funding bodies like the Social
Science Research Council (SSRC) in the US abolished Area Studies com-
mittees in 1996, withdrew funding and instead launched new initiatives
on cross-regional and globalization issues.17 While African Studies clearly
did not disappear or metamorphose into Global Studies, the new geopol-
itical landscape changed the perceived relevance of African Studies within
the policy world and within the academe.
Then came September 11, 2001, and ‘place’ reasserted its importance.
Almost overnight African Studies, along with the other Area Studies, were
back in fashion, but this time in a different relationship to geopolitics.
Whether as political scientist, anthropologist, or linguist, the country expert’s
intimate knowledge of place is now valued for its potential contributions to
global security, stabilization, and strategies of counter-terrorism. Funding
from research councils, private foundations, and government ministries is
again flowing freely, often to projects with a direct focus on security—be it
failed states, radicalization, or the effectiveness of security sector reform.
This is why the answer to the question of Africa’s position within IR
cannot simply be ‘add Africa and stir’. Geopolitics has an impact on the
structure of values within the academe, and contemporary incentives and
pressures from governments and funding councils for policy relevance
contribute towards making Africa a more attractive focus of research
within IR. This does not fundamentally alter the relative value of the
nomothetic and the idiographic, but combined with IR’s increased aware-
ness of its own parochialism it recalibrates their relationship within the
symbolic politics of the academe. Importantly then, Africa does not enter

15. Paul T. Zeleza, ‘African Studies and universities since independence’, Transition 101
(2009), pp. 110–135.
16. See Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the future: Modernization theory in cold war America
(Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 2004).
17. Zeleza, ‘African Studies’.
 AFRICA AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 131

the discipline of IR as a neutral object of study but is instead already over-

determined and embedded in diverse struggles.
The current question of Africa and IR thus brings both challenges and
opportunities. Politically, Africa’s popularity raises the spectre of an African
Studies yet again subservient to the interests and requirements of the
powerful, of knowledge produced, utilized, and mobilized in the service of
dominant states. Significant concerns have already been raised that the US
Department of Defense’s Minerva Funds and other military-sponsored
research is skewing knowledge about the continent towards US security
interests.18 As such, the heightened geopolitical importance of the continent
involves scholars in complex balancing acts, weighing the desire and obliga-
tion towards policy relevance and impact against the dangers of cooptation,
the loss of an independent, critical voice, and the risk of yet again becoming
building blocks in wider geopolitical and intellectual agendas.
Epistemologically and methodologically, however, the current situation
is rife with opportunities to bring Africa into IR, not as an exception or a
mere illustration but as an articulation of the global. The combination of
Africa’s centrality to international security and IR’s sensitivity to its dis-
ciplinary parochialism might—if carefully negotiated—provide the condi-
tions of possibility for escaping what Paulin Hountondji has described as
Africa’s theoretical and intellectual ‘extraversion’, i.e. the tendency to
treat the continent as a place for the application of theories developed in
the North or as merely a source of data rather than a site whence we can
generate broader ideas and theoretical insights.19
Africa’s current security predicament illustrates with particular clarity how
the continent’s politics is simultaneously global politics. Understanding
Africa’s insecurity certainly requires specific knowledge and country expert-
ise, but these issues are also at the heart of the most pressing contemporary
global challenges regarding peace, democracy, freedom, tolerance, and so
on. They are, in different words, disciplinary concerns, and as such can be
seen as an invitation to Africanists to break free of strict geographical

18. William G. Martin and Brendan Innis McQuade, ‘Militarising—and marginalising?—

African Studies USA’, Review of African Political Economy 41,141 (2014), pp. 441–457; Hugh
Gusterson, ‘Project Minerva and the militarization of anthropology’, Radical Teacher 86
(2009), pp. 4–16.
19. Paulin J. Hountondji, The struggle for meaning: Reflections on philosophy, culture, and dem-
ocracy in Africa (Ohio University Press, Ohio, Ill., 2002). Hountondji’s main concern is to
produce endogenous theories, i.e. theories by Africans. As he writes, ‘African scholars
involved in African Studies should have another priority, which is to develop first and fore-
most an Africa-based tradition of knowledge in all disciplines, a tradition where questions
are initiated and research agendas set out directly or indirectly by African societies them-
selves.’ Paulin J. Hountondji, ‘Knowledge of Africa, knowledge by Africans: Two perspec-
tives on African Studies’, RCCS Annual Review 1 (2009) <http://www.ces.uc.pt/publicacoes/
annualreview/media/2009%20issue%20n.%201/AR1_6.PHountondji_RCCS80.pdf> (11
November 2016).
132 AFRICAN AFFAIRS

boundaries and speak not only to Africa-specific audiences but also to

broader global concerns.
Africanists can only rise to this challenge by resisting the temptation to
retreat to the safety of specificity and exclusive country expertise, that is,
by being willing to negotiate a tradition of study that values the idio-
graphic above all and move some way towards engagement with the theor-
etical and with more generalized knowledge. This need not (and indeed
should not) entail an unconditional embrace of large-scale n-studies and
universal predictive laws, and it is necessary to remain acutely attuned to
the dangers of falling prey to the limitations of macro-approaches and
meta-theory.20 Instead it requires nimble negotiation of the specific and
the general—by no means an easy challenge! Below I suggest that an
assemblage approach offers one way of meeting this challenge and bring-
ing Africa into IR in a manner that appreciated both its specificity and its
globality, while simultaneously keeping a careful eye on the politics of
doing so.

Assembling the global from the African ground up

An assemblage approach to the study of Africa differs in significant ways
from other, more well-known critiques of Western knowledge, such as post-
colonial or decolonial perspectives.21 These approaches seek to expose the
false universality of Western thought, to write history from a different per-
spective and thereby lay bare its provinciality and particularity, as well as its
implication in power, violence, and domination. Assemblage thinking pro-
vides a similar critique by making visible the complicities, silences, and
unspoken value judgments of many taken-for-granted analytical concepts,
but its foundation is a more wholesale, ontological scepticism that is
marked by a radical rejection of predefined totalities and reified units of
analysis.22

20. For a relevant discussion on different methodologies and African Studies, see Nic
Cheeseman, Carl Death and Lindsay Whitfield, ‘Notes on researching Africa’, <http://www.
oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/afrafj/introduction+research+notes.pdf> (12 November 2016).
21. This is not the place for a detailed review of these (and other) perspectives, but see
Edward Said, Orientalism (Pantheon Books, New York, 1978); Dipesh Chakrabarty,
Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference (Princeton University Press,
Princeton, NJ., 2000); Walter D. Mingolo, The darker side of Western modernity: Global futures,
decolonial options (Duke University Press, Durham, NC., 2011). For a discussion of post-
colonial theory and African Studies, see Rita Abrahamsen, ‘African Studies and the post-
colonial challenge’, African Affairs 102, 407 (2003), pp. 189–210.
22. There is no single assemblage theory or methodology, and indeed, for some, assem-
blage thinking does not amount to a theory, but rather ‘a repository of methods and onto-
logical stances towards the social’. Michele Acuto and Simon Curtis, ‘Assemblage thinking
and International Relations’, in Michele Acuto and Simon Curtis (eds), Reassembling inter-
national theory (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2014), p. 3.
 AFRICA AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 133

Concepts such as state, society, or the international help make sense of

the world and order complex social phenomena into categories, theories,
and causal mechanisms, but they simultaneously risk forcing the social
world to conform to preconceived definitions and categories. Concepts and
theories can thus become straightjackets, deprived of explanatory value and
unable to capture difference, rapid change, and social transformations.
Instead of seeing how social relations work, differ, and change, the social
scientist looks for the ‘state’ or ‘society’, expecting them to conform to pre-
determined patterns and dynamics. An assemblage methodology entails a
more open and agnostic attitude to the social world, seeking to take
account of the provisional and historically contingent relations between
heterogeneous elements, both human and non-human.23 Put differ-
ently, and more concretely, the object or area of study—be it the state,
society, Africa, or the international—is not predetermined by existing
theories and categories, but instead approached as something to be dis-
covered empirically in the way that different elements are fitted together
into contingent systems of varying durability.24 From this perspective,
politics and society in any location is assembled, as opposed to onto-
logically given, the building blocks being a multiplicity of actors,
actants, knowledges, norms, values, and technologies, some local, some
global, some public, and some private. ‘The international’, as IR’s
object of study, is thus potentially found in any location and can be
traced in its specificity from the ground up in assemblages that inhabit
national settings but are stretched across sovereign boundaries.
As an approach to the study of Africa, assemblage thinking is attractive
for several interconnected reasons. First, by acknowledging the assembled
character of all social worlds, polities, and politics, it does not start from a
priori categories or predefined units and norms of analysis. Instead it seeks
to discover—from the ground up—how contingent elements are assembled
and come to work together, whether harmoniously or competitively, and
accordingly it is less burdened by the baggage collected by decades of
Western-centric inquiries. Second, it draws attention to multi-scalar con-
nections, abandoning strict dichotomies between the global and the local,
the international, and the domestic. The social world is approached as one
analytical field or as an assemblage that is not wholly determined by its
location within a national setting, but is instead shaped in the interaction of
a multiplicity of local and global actors and forces. By abandoning the strict
boundary between the domestic and the international, or the beloved
inside/outside distinction of IR, causal connections and influences are

23. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the social (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007).
24. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A thousand plateaus (University of Minneapolis
Press, Minneapolis, MN., 2003).
134 AFRICAN AFFAIRS

stretched further, allowing an escape from the frequent essentialism

entailed in depicting something as ‘African’. Global influences and
responsibilities, and their local entanglements, are thus brought more
clearly into view. Third, assemblage thinking entails a recognition of dif-
ference and pluralism, as no two assemblages are the same. As such, it
offers a way of avoiding the universalism and Western-centrism of many
IR and comparative perspectives, where difference is always measured
against a norm. Fourth, and finally, thinking with assemblages privileges
an approach that is attuned to change, to how different social orders
come in to being and how they endure. It privileges neither the fixed nor
the contingent, but by focusing on actual assemblages and how things
function together, it turns what is frequently (in other approaches) the-
oretical commitments into empirical, practical questions of what social
orders look like, what makes them possible, and what is required for
them to endure. As such, it draws attention to the multiple forms and
sources of agency, and the different forms of power, resources, and cap-
acities different actors and actants possess.
As an illustration, consider the African state from an assemblage per-
spective. The African state, it seems, can be almost endlessly pathologized
as some deviant form of an ideal Weberian, Western state; suffice to men-
tion the neopatrimonial state, the weak state, the failed state, the crimina-
lized state, the quasi-sovereign state, and so on. Many analyses of the
state are in this way a classic example of the application of theory to
Africa, seeking to fit its institutions and practices into an already existing
model—and constantly finding it wanting.
In my own research I encountered this analytical proclivity when investi-
gating the global rise and authority of private security in international polit-
ics.25 In discussions about security privatization, Africa was curiously
present and absent at one and the same time; present as a worse case,
doomsday scenario, yet absent as a serious site for empirical and theoret-
ical investigation of the causes and implications for politics, security, and
global governance. Most discussions started from the classic Weberian def-
inition of the state and its monopoly of the legitimate use of force, drawing
attention to the fact that in the majority of African countries this monopoly
had never existed. The state, in other words, was already a weak or failed
state and in accordance with this theoretical commitment, the rise of pri-
vate actors, be they mercenaries, commercial security companies or vigi-
lantes, was interpreted as yet another indication of the failure and
continued decline of the African state.26

25. Rita Abrahamsen and Michael C. Williams, Security beyond the state: Private security in
international politics (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011).
26. E.g. Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, ‘Weak states and the growth of the private security
sector in Africa: Whither the African state’, in Sabelo Gumedze (ed.), Private security in
 AFRICA AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 135

While this picture captures some salient aspects of recent transforma-

tions in security provision and governance, it not only risks essentializing
the African state but also misses more profound shifts and restructurings
both at the global and the local level. An assemblage approach, by com-
parison, brings these evolving dynamics more clearly into view, and
applied to security privatization and the state the four advantages of
assemblage thinking identified above translates as follows. First, from an
assemblage perspective, the impact of security privatization cannot start
from an a priori definition of the state and an assumption of its power and
authority over other actors. Instead it calls for a careful empirical investi-
gation of how social order, authority, and security are assembled in inter-
action, negotiation, and competition between a range of different actors,
including the private, the public, its security forces, as well as a host of
more distant global actors, discourses, values, norms, and technologies.
Our own research reveals that rather than a straightforward weakening of
the state, the multiple processes of security privatization cannot be cap-
tured in a vocabulary restrained by the opposition of state weakness and
state strength. Instead, in numerous different locations—from the swamps
of the Niger Delta to the streets of Cape Town—private security actors
are part of processes that transform security provision and governance
and that in turn give rise to new institutions, practices, and forms of
authority.27 Within these ‘global security assemblages’ different global
and local, public, and private agents interact, cooperate, and compete,
and security and governance are shaped and influenced by normative
orders both within and beyond the nation state. Private and global actors
and norms interact with the public and the national to such a degree that
it is often difficult to determine where the public ends and the private
begins, and by the same token, where the global ceases and the local
starts. Within global security assemblages, then, the very categories of
public/private and global/local are being reconstituted and reconfigured,
and far from conforming to any predefined object of analysis, the state is
being assembled or reassembled, not from scratch, but in ways that alter
and challenge many preconceived notions of the public/private and the
global/local. The state, in other words, is not necessarily or automatically
weakened, but instead the construction of the state proceeds apace with—
and in relationship with—a multitude of other actors within global secur-
ity assemblages.

Africa (Institute of Security Studies, Pretoria, 2007), pp.17–38; Michelle Small,

‘Privatisation of security and military functions and the demise of the modern nation-state in
Africa’, Occasional Paper Series 1:2 (ACCORD, London, 2006); Peter Singer, Corporate war-
riors: The rise of the privatized military industry (Cornell University Press, Itacha, NY, 2003).
27. Abrahamsen and Williams, Security beyond the state.
136 AFRICAN AFFAIRS

Second, by abandoning the inside/outside dichotomy and approaching

the social world as one analytical field, an assemblage approach shows
how both the causes and effects of security privatization cannot be con-
tained within the African continent. Specifically, the phenomenal growth
of private security actors cannot be explained only with reference to the
African state or African security governance but is intimately connected to
multiple global transformations in governance, technologies, norms, and
values. Most notably, the move towards forms of governing that empow-
ers the private sector, while strengthening various mechanisms of rule at a
distance, has not only facilitated the emergence of a global security sector
in search for overseas markets but also embedded the private within the
institutions of the public. The rise of the risk society and risk-based think-
ing and technologies are similarly important, as are international trade
norms and regulations that delink security from politics and the exclusive
purview of the state and instead treat it as a ‘service’ like any other.28 The
involvement of private security in African settings in turn further strength-
ens the authority and legitimacy of commercial actors and enhances their
ability to shape global security thinking, strategies, regulation, and govern-
ance. What is at stake in ‘security privatization’ is thus much more than a
simple transfer of previously public functions to private actors. Instead,
security privatization indicates important developments in the relationship
between security and the sovereign state, structures of political power and
authority, and the operations of global capital. Approached from an
assemblage perspective, the study of security privatization and its effects
on the African state is not then only a story of local specificity but also of
global practices and transformations. While security privatization has its
own particular articulation in different settings, the notion of an assem-
blage allows us to capture local complexity and specificity and at the same
time trace connections, relations, and transformations from the African
ground up. It allows not only for an in-depth inquiry and understanding
of African specificity but also for the development of a broader theoretical
and analytical framework for the analysis of global security governance.
Studying Africa is thus simultaneously to study the world, or international
relations, and to contribute to disciplinary debates.
Third, because no two assemblages are the same, an assemblage
approach facilitates the empirical exploration of the relationships between
the state and private security actors, without an explicit or implicit com-
parison to a Western state norm. Rather the focus is on exploring and
explaining the manner in which the state and its security functions come

28. On risk society, see Ulrich Beck, Risk society: Towards a new modernity (Sage, London,
1992). For further elaboration on the interconnected causes of security privatization, see
Abrahamsen and Williams, Security beyond the state, chapter 2.
 AFRICA AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 137

into being and are shaped by different histories, cultures, and dynamics,
without seeking to identify their deviance from a given standard. This
means, for example, that the colonial origin of the state and the emer-
gence of its security forces as defenders of the regime rather than guar-
dians of citizens become historically significant factors. But it does not
mean that normative judgments about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ state behaviours
and security practices cannot be made, or that political evaluation should
be suspended in the name of blind relativism. Instead, it requires us to be
upfront about our values and judgments and to recognize the implicit
biases of many predefined social science concepts and variables, and the
manner in which they are tied to a specific Western historiography and
epistemology.
Fourth, and finally, by approaching the state and social orders not as
fixed or static, but as contingent and evolving, an assemblage approach
draws attention to the manner in which different actors are empowered or
disempowered by transformations in security governance. In particular, it
shows how the move towards new public management, risk-based think-
ing and technologies have provided private security actors with new forms
of power, resources and authority that in turn have enabled them to
expand, interact, and negotiate with the public in more effective ways
than before. It also shows, however, how the state, the public police, mili-
tary, and various security institutions retain important forms of power and
authority, and in this way it places the politics and competition for
resources and influence centre stage. The question of who has the ability
to determine security strategies and orders thus becomes an empirical
investigation centred on the forms of power and authority operating
within assemblages that are stretched globally and include a multiplicity
of actors, technologies, knowledges, and normativities. For example, on
the streets of Cape Town, the world’s biggest private security company,
Group4Security, could mobilize its expertise, capital, and technology to
gain a significant influence within security provision and governance, but
it could only do so in negotiation and cooperation with local business cap-
ital, the city administration, and the public police.29 Understanding the
politics of security, and by implication who has access to the city, is
accordingly a question of unravelling how different actors access different
forms of power and resources and how they come together in different
alliances and assemblages.
This becomes particularly important when engaging with the politics of
security—and the politics of studying Africa—in the post-9/11 environ-
ment. With the global war on terror and the emergence of Africa as the

29. Abrahamsen and Williams, Security beyond the state.

138 AFRICAN AFFAIRS

new frontline in the fight against extremism,30 the reach and influence of
private security actors have expanded yet further, in part due to various
forms of outsourcing and in part due to the increasing securitization of
the continent and its development problems. This makes the analysis of
Africa’s security predicament more pressing, but as discussed above it
also makes it important to maintain sufficient critical distance to the agen-
das of powerful external actors. By drawing attention to the imbrication of
the local and the global and by focusing on the multiplicity of actors and
their forms of competition, an assemblage approach makes a careful ana-
lysis of the politics of security possible. Such an analysis would seek to
specify the forms of power, and by implication the responsibility, of differ-
ent actors within security assemblages, and in this way enables a critique
of the strategies of powerful states and non-state actors.

Conclusion
The intention of this Research Note is neither to launch assemblage think-
ing as a new meta-narrative for the study of Africa in IR, nor to suggest that
this is the only legitimate or even the best way to study Africa. But as I have
argued, bringing Africa into IR cannot be simply a question of ‘add and
stir’, as the continent does not enter the discipline as a neutral object of
study. Instead, it is already overdetermined and embedded within the polit-
ics and structure of values of the academe, which are in turn influenced in
complex ways by changing geopolitical circumstances. IR’s increased
awareness of its own parochialism, combined with the present position of
Africa as ‘the frontline in the war on terror’, thus harbour both opportun-
ities and dangers. For these reasons, bringing Africa into IR involves com-
plex epistemological and methodological challenges relating to our object
of study and political challenges relating to the contemporary securitization
of Africa. My modest suggestion is that assemblage thinking offers one way
of negotiating this encounter between Africa and IR.
Epistemologically and methodologically, approaching Africa from an
assemblage perspective makes it possible to study Africa as both a place in
the world and as a place of the world, taking account of the uniqueness of
place and its simultaneous globality. Put differently, it allows for a theor-
ization of the international from the African ground up. In this approach,
Africa is not some distant locale whose relevance needs to be demon-
strated within the disciplines but instead a window on our contemporary
world. As such, my intervention echoes that of Jean Comaroff and John
Comaroff who have argued that the postcolonies might offer ‘privileged

30. For an interesting analysis, see Nick Turse, Tomorrow’s battlefield: US proxy wars and
secret ops in Africa (Haymarket Books, Chicago, Ill., 2015).
 AFRICA AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 139

insights into the workings of the world at large’.31 This is no easy under-
taking. On the part of Africanists, it requires a willingness to rethink their
object of study and the forms of capital routinely invoked to establish
expertise and status as an Africanist. On the part of IR scholars, it requires
a greater openness towards specificity and difference, without simply add-
ing ‘Africa’ as a symbolic badge of honour at a time when non-Western
approaches and policy relevance are part of new theoretical fads and fund-
ing requirements.
Politically, thinking in terms of assemblages offers no easy solution to the
risks of an African Studies in the service of the powerful. Much as assem-
blage approaches are critical of dominant ontologies, they can also have a
penchant for description rather than analysis and critique.32 At the same
time, the notion of an assemblage invariably draws attention to the multipli-
city of actors, their various forms of power, and their struggles over influ-
ence. Thinking politically with assemblages accordingly demands constant
attention and vigilance towards how the political orders of contemporary
Africa come into being, what forms of agency and power different actors,
actants, norms, and values have, in order to ensure that scholarship is not
simply serving the powerful but instead seeks to uncover new political possi-
bilities. Carefully executed, such analyses offer unique opportunities to place
the study of Africa at the centre of IR’s contemporary theoretical, social,
and political enquiries.
While this Research Note has focused on IR and security, an assem-
blage approach can also enrich African Studies more broadly. By recog-
nizing the manner in which the social world (the local and the global, the
specific and the general) is assembled in interaction and negotiation, an
assemblage approach makes it possible to keep the best of what the trad-
ition of African Studies has to offer in terms of detailed local knowledge
and country expertise, while simultaneously recognizing that Africa is also
an articulation of the world in which we live. This would enable a very dif-
ferent answer to the question posed by the provost in the edited collection
by Bates, Mudimbe, and O’Barr, as Africa is no longer some distant or
deviant locale whose relevance needs to be demonstrated within or to the
disciplines but instead a window on our contemporary world.

31. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, ‘Theory from the south: Or, how Euro-America
is evolving toward Africa’, Anthropological Forum 22, 2 (2012), pp. 113–131, p. 1; See also
Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall, ‘Writing the world from an African metropolis’, Public
Culture 16, 3 (2004), pp. 347–372.
32. Ben Anderson, Matthew Kearnes, Colin McFarlane, and Dan Swanton, ‘On assem-
blage and geography’, Dialogues in Human Geography 2, 2 (2012), pp. 171–189.