Abstract
At the beginning of November 2007, a group of scholars studying the Middle East and Africa announced the creation of a new scholarly organization, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA). ASMEA is the starkest example, but its creation signaled a larger shift, or split, in the study of Africa in the United States after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Although existing scholarly organizations continued to study the same topics and employ the same methodologies as they had before 9/11, increased US government funding for African studies and the creation of new organizations have pushed the field toward a focus on security and military issues, much to the deficit of the issues that the leading figures in African studies had deemed worthwhile in the preceding years.
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Notes
- 1.
The European Command was responsible for the majority of the continent, Central Command for Egypt, Sudan, the Horn, and Kenya, and Pacific Command the islands of the Indian Ocean.
- 2.
An example of these concerns arose at Temple University in 2014. Two economics professors, Simon Hakim and Erwin Blackstone, wrote a working paper and a series of op-eds based on it that claimed private prisons saved money with no decline in services. They did not disclose that they had received funding from companies that operated private prisons (Flaherty 2014).
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Unangst, M. (2019). Re-inventing the Heart of Darkness for the Twenty-First Century: African Studies and the War on Terror Since 9/11. In: Finney, M., Shannon, M. (eds) 9/11 and the Academy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16419-5_8
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