Marie V Gibert

In this introduction to the collection we explain its focus on non-Western small states. While the terms ‘non-Western’ and ‘small states’ are problematic – we discuss these problems here – the smallness and non-Westerness of the states studied by the contributing authors set them apart in a way that has attracted little academic attention so far. They allow them to operate with fewer normative and practical constraints than their bigger, Western counterparts, offer them a wide range of (often historically forged) political ties, and force them to draw on a diversity of approach and strategic thinking and a creativity that they are too rarely credited for. Non-Western small states, rather than being mere survivors constrained to the world’s periphery, are better understood as activist states intent on existing. The collection offers a range of analytical keys to make sense of these states and their role on the international scene.

In this article, the author reflects on how she and her students were able to draw on elements of popular culture to develop their understanding of Africa's international relations. The article shows, in particular, how the use of popular culture material has, as the relevant pedagogical literature suggests, strengthened student engagement and deepened their learning experience, notably by offering them greater freedom in their analysis and interpretation of the ideas and issues studied in class. Most importantly, the use of popular culture has helped them consider the very wide range of voices and views on Africa, its politics and international relations, but also apprehend popular culture as a political arena – one where political images and ideas are shaped that durably inform and influence international relations and politics.

Sub-Saharan Africa, although not among Europe's closest neighbours, has, over the past decade, increasingly been perceived as a source of threats to Europe's security. This article will attempt to outline European perceptions of African security and justice issues and how these perceptions have in turn influenced the EU's policies in Africa. Specific attention will be given here to Guinea-Bissau, which is a particularly interesting and illustrative case study, as this small country in West Africa has attracted considerable European engagement in such fields as illegal immigration, counter-terrorism, drug-combating and security sector reform. This European engagement through different, at times uncoordinated and overlapping, channels does not always make for a consistent approach and underlines a profound gap between what has come to be a generally accepted diagnostic – that international insecurity is caused, or at least facilitated, by weak states – and the remedies applied by the EU. While Europe increasingly perceives Africa's weak governance as a security threat, it remains unwilling to engage politically and on a longer-term basis on the continent.

The international community currently favours an approach to development that stresses a triangular linkage between security, good governance and economic development. This approach clearly informs the European Union’s agenda in Africa, which has progressively integrated governance and security elements. This paper will show that this agenda is at least as much determined by the bureaucratic and national affiliations of the concerned EU actors as it is by African realities and international trends. African security indeed triggers a competition between the different European institutions, eager to be the driving force for a policy that can offer some additional resources and autonomy. The consistency and the credibility of the EU security policy in Africa will therefore depend on the responses provided to these institutional rivalries.
Co-authored with Niagalé Bagayoko

The partnership between the European Union (EU) and the African Union (AU) in Darfur is attracting renewed, and critical attention on the former’s growing political role in Africa. The EU is a major aid provider in Africa and has tended, since the beginning of the 1990s, to expand its exclusively developmental
role to a more political one through a greater involvement in security issues. In the Horn of Africa, however, most former colonial powers have only maintained loose links with their former colonies, with the obvious exception of France in Djibouti. The Horn’s very strategic location has slowly made it a US chasse gardée where the EU and its member states often
remain behind the scene. Since the 9/11 attacks it has been one of the regions most closely observed by Western intelligence. Counter-terrorism issues have clearly influenced US politics in the region. This Briefing will examine whether the EU shares these and other US concerns.

In a fast-growing and changing city such as Nairobi, some public buildings
and services have changed remarkably little over the decades. Such is the
case with the McMillan Memorial Library, built in 1931 and situated in
Nairobi’s Central Business District (CBD), but also of the less known public
libraries of Kaloleni and Makadara, two poorer areas of Nairobi. Ever since
their respective creations all three libraries, which are referred to collectively
as the ‘McMillan libraries’, have continuously delivered a much-needed
public service to a population thirsty for education and safe spaces to study,
in spite of a lack of investment and increasing state of decay. Book Bunk,
a small civil society organisation founded in 2017 by Angela Wachuka and
Wanjiru Koinange, two Kenyan book professionals, has resolved to address
the matter by setting up a partnership with Nairobi City County Government,
assessing needs (from an architectural, inventory and users’ perspective),
rehabilitating the buildings and exploring new ways in which they and their
historical and new contents might be explored, questioned and appropriated
by Nairobi’s population.
In this chapter, I first show that the libraries, through Book Bunk’s work on
them, have become the sites of an important reflection on the role libraries can
play in better representing and understanding Kenya’s colonial past, building
a more inclusive culture and offering a different public space and service.
In other words, Book Bunk’s work on the libraries is placing these three
outdated but tranquil refuges at the heart of crucial and heated public debates
about history, memory and collective imagination and representation. In the
remainder of the chapter, I discuss how Book Bunk is attempting to define a
fine line between discarding and preserving history with regard to the libraries’
buildings, books and purpose. In doing this, Book Bunk and the libraries are
offering their own answers to global debates about decolonising our public spaces, making history and memory accessible to all and offering a platform
to Kenya’s many, including female, voices.

Sub-Saharan Africa, although not among Europe’s closest neighbours, has, over the past decade, increasingly been perceived as a source of threats to Europe’s security. This article will attempt to outline European perceptions of African security and justice issues and how these perceptions have in turn influenced the EU’s policies in Africa. Specific attention will be given here to Guinea-Bissau, which is a particularly interesting and illustrative case study, as this small country in West Africa has attracted considerable European engagement in such fields as illegal immigration, counter-terrorism, drug-combating and security sector reform. This European engagement through different, at times uncoordinated and overlapping, channels does not always make for a consistent approach and underlines a profound gap between what has come to be a generally accepted diagnostic – that international insecurity is caused, or at least facilitated, by weak states – and the remedies applied by the EU. While Europe increasingly perceives Africa’s weak governance as a security threat, it remains unwilling to engage politically and on a longer term
basis on the continent.

The international community currently favours an approach to development that stresses a triangular linkage between security, good governance and economic development. This approach clearly informs the European Union's agenda in Africa, which has progressively integrated governance and security elements.

This paper will show that this agenda is at least as much determined by the bureaucratic and national affiliations of the concerned EU actors as it is by African realities and international trends. African security indeed triggers a competition between the different European institutions, eager to be the driving force for a policy that can offer some additional resources and autonomy. The consistency and the credibility of the EU security policy in Africa will therefore depend on the responses provided to these institutional rivalries.

Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Côte d'Ivoire … For many, these names conjure up political crises and violent conflicts. The five West African countries that constitute the Mano River Basin have attracted significant international and regional attention and preoccupation over the last fifteen years.

Due to its history of colonial involvement in Africa, Europe shares a common past with these countries and has maintained a close partnership with them ever since their independence. Over the years, a series of agreements has established trade and development aid partnership links between the European Union and the Africa-Caribbean-Pacific (ACP) group of states. An increasing emphasis on political stability and on security was progressively introduced into the two last Lomé agreements and their successor, the Cotonou Agreement (2000). This peace and security dimension is also fully acknowledged in the EU's strategic partnership for Africa, which sets out the steps the EU will take by 2015 to support African efforts to build a peaceful future.

The Mano River conflicts justified and gave a new urgency to these new efforts and the region remains the focus of considerable European political analysis and attention. This Chaillot Paper focuses on the recent trend in the EU towards a holistic understanding of development in Africa, whereby security, political stability and democracy are now considered essential elements in the recipe for economic development. A range of specific EU instruments for dealing with Africa has gradually emerged in this context. Against this background, the paper suggests some approaches for the improvement of the EU's current responses to West Africa's fragile economic and political stability.

In a previous piece on this blog, I described what I felt where the many challenges to academic motherhood. I ended the piece by noting that many of the current institutional arrangements meant to improve equality and diversity in academia are 'cosmetic add-ons' and equality and diversity will only exist once academics accept that they need to rethink their relationship to work, acknowledge their power to resist and, in doing so, engage in a much needed politics of care in higher education. This is something I want to explore further here (note that as in my previous post, I will refer to the examples I know best, i.e. those relating to academic motherhood, but have no doubt that the general argument also applies to other academic minorities) (Part 2 of 2). All British universities now have equality and diversity policies, with a specific professional team in charge of seeing to their implementation, which includes introducing new policies, dealing with the most serious cases of discrimination, but also overseeing the training of members of staff, starting with academics and human resources personnel. In addition, schemes have been put in place to recognise and reward academic institutions that are committed to fighting against discrimination at work, and have obtained significant, measurable results. The Athena SWAN scheme thus focuses specifically on gender equality – 136 British higher education institutions are members of the scheme, sharing between them 536 institutional or departmental awards. Of these 7 institutions have attained a silver award, while gold awards have only been awarded at departmental level. There is thus awareness, at institutional level, of the issues I described in my previous blog piece, and of the negative impact it can have on academia, notably in terms of image. Sadly, however, I concur with an anonymous colleague who recently noted that when it comes to equality and diversity, many institutions only care about appearances. I would go even further and suggest that equality and diversity policies are essentially geared towards protecting institutions and their managers against potential accusations of discrimination, rather than about effectively ensuring greater equality and diversity and protecting minority groups. In my long career as a job applicant, I have seen many departments highlight that they were especially keen to recruit female candidates and/or candidates from ethnic minorities in order to address existing imbalances. Claiming to want to address lack of diversity is one thing, however. Putting in place the institutional arrangements that will effectively ensure greater equality and diversity is quite another, and a price few institutions are willing to pay. In fact, many institutions are actually going back on a number of policies that ensured academic parents' rights. Anglia Ruskin University is thus planning to close its nursery, while the students' union at the London School of Economics has also recently expressed concern that the school's nursery, which offers on-campus childcare (including in an emergency) to academics and students, may once again be at risk of closure – both would be following in this many other such facilities, within and without of academia. Likewise, some universities are reneging on their previously more generous maternity leave payment policies and contenting themselves with the legal minimum payments. This, along with other work pressures, is bound to have an effect not only on mothers but also on fathers and their readiness to take the statutory additional paternity leave to which they are now entitled. [Interestingly, information about maternity leave payment is very difficult to come by when one applies for a job – it is generally hidden on staff intranet UK PSA Women & Politics Specialist Group 

As she leaves formal academia after resigning from her permanent post last year, Marie V. Gibert reflects on the combined challenges of parenthood and womanhood in academia, and how they strongly affect the career chances of academic mothers (Part 1 of 2).

In this article, the author reflects on how she and her students were able to draw on elements of popular culture to develop their understanding of Africa’s international relations. The article shows, in particular, how the use of popular culture material has, as the relevant pedagogical literature suggests, strengthened student engagement and deepened their learning experience, notably by offering them greater freedom in their analysis and interpretation of the ideas and issues studied in class. Most importantly, the use of popular culture has helped them consider the very wide range of voices and views on Africa, its politics and international relations, but also apprehend popular culture as a political arena – one where political images and ideas are shaped that durably inform and influence international relations and politics.

ABSTRACT In the official discourse, “convergence” between the European Union and its African partners takes place through partnership and common goals. The concrete actions undertaken (or not) by both sets of actors to turn this apparent convergence into reality are, however, far more complex and uneven than the official discourse suggests. They are on some occasions dissonant, both in the actual objectives pursued on the ground and in their implementation by the two sides of the partnership. In trying to explain this convergence/dissonance gap, this contribution underlines the highly experimental nature of the EU-Africa relations and accounts for some of the contradictions and inefficiencies so often pointed out in previous studies.

The European Union (EU) is a significant political and security actor in the Great Lakes region, notably via the four Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) missions sent to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the high amounts of development aid contributed to the region’s four states. Yet the EU is struggling, alongside other international actors, to both prevent crises and impose itself as a key political and diplomatic actor in the region. The reason for this lies mainly in the nature of the EU as an inter-governmental organisation, a long-time aid donor, and a still young international and political actor. These constraints have made it difficult, so far, for the EU to respond effectively and coherently to the complex challenges of a region that is rapidly changing political faces.

This article focuses on the negotiations that the European Commission, with the formal support of France, Italy and Spain, opened with Senegal in 2008 for a mobility partnership agreement. Mobility partnerships, as defined by the Commission in 2007, are a new EU (multilateral) instrument for managing migratory flows into the Union. The negotiations with Senegal were indefinitely suspended in 2009 and are now widely considered as having failed. This article sets out to identify the factors that contributed to the suspension of talks. It shows that failure can be attributed to a complex web of factors originating in the specific Senegalese, European and Senegal-EU political landscapes and jointly contributing to an unfavourable cost-benefit calculation by the French and Senegalese parties to the negotiation, to an unclear and awkward negotiating strategy on the part of the European Commission and to incoherent, EU and Senegalese, foreign policies. This, in turn, points to the complex ...

The contestation was a three-way struggle: between the government (including the new Kibaki government elected in 2002), parliament and the political parties, and the civil society bodies with politicians even of the opposition parties as likely to oppose the last as support their efforts. Indeed even after the Commission's draft had been submitted, efforts to undermine it persisted and were finally successful when Parliament decided that it was the sole body that should draw up and approve a constitution. So although there was a referendum which did limit their having the final say, the voting was on a new draft put together by the Government. It was referred to as the Wako draft, after the Attorney General (both in the Moi and Kibaki governments). As some commentators remarked 'the politicians highjacked the process'.

Extracted from text ... Blood from stones: The secret fi nancial network of terror* Douglas Farah * Broadway Books, New York, 2004, ISBN 0767915623, 240 pp, hardcover. The title of Farah's book is misleading. One would expect an in-depth and systematic analysis of the links between West Africa's blood diamonds and international terrorist networks. In fact, the title's 'blood stones' provided the fi rst lead in a worldwide investigation of terrorist fi nancial networks that took Farah from West Africa to the Middle East to the United States. Farah spent a little less than two years, from March 2000 to November 2001, in West ..

Senegal, along with Cape Verde, is first amongst West African states to engage in a mobility partnership with the European Union (EU). Begun in June 2008, the aim of the mobility partnership is to facilitate circular migration, which the European Commission has defined as 'a form ...