Regional Cooperation for Security and Development in Africa

Abstract

International relations theory (IRT) has been called an American discipline, portraying the world order in a Cold War context from the US national security perspective. In particular the Third World, as it was called, was seen mainly as an arena for superpower or great power rivalry, rather than as an actor in its own right. To some extent area studies, among which African Studies has been prominent, sometimes has been seen as a remedy to this Western ethnocentrism and misplaced universalism, since it focuses on the peculiar and contextual rather than the general and universal. Both academic positions as described here are likely to be exaggerated, and, to the extent they are expressed in such doctrinaire terms, they probably signify a rather non-principled struggle for academic resources.¹

Just as I was convinced that political freedom was the essential forerunner of our economic growth and that it must come, so I am equally convinced that African Union will come and provide that united, integrated base upon which our fullest development can be secured.

— Kwame Nkrumah (1963: p. 170)