Double Victimisation? Law, Decoloniality and Research Ethics in Post-Colonial Africa (original) (raw)
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2021
Even since Weber and Durkheim made it a major intellectual topic, violence has been a research object with significant emotional, partisan, and ideological power (Arendt 1972; Howell and Willis 1989; Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004; Jones and Rodgers 2019). Although it increasingly raises questions that concern the human and social sciences in general, the topic simultaneously requires an interrogation of methods and ethics concerning access to fieldwork, the nature of collected sources and the conditions in which they were collected, as well as self-reflexivity on the part of the researcher. Furthermore, the definition of violence as a social fact is relative and subject to debate. (Heitmeyer and Hagan 2003). It is not enough to rely on an axiological neutrality which, when dealing with violent practices, risks ratifying the erasure of persecutors' actions and responsibilities (Naepels 2006). Research on violence carries psychological and moral implications, which is why it requires rigour to ensure its legitimacy among the social sciences and humanities and to protect it from any form of voyeurism. One of the most important questions that arises in the analysis of such phenomena, however, is the compatibility between empirical requirements and the physical and psychological integrity of the researcher. This special issue aims at contributing to the important, if not critical, reflection on violence in the humanities and social sciences, on the African continent in particular. For researchers, the concern is indeed not to abandon the research and analyses of violent settings to humanitarian actions and media expertise. Although the term "field" originated from the military vocabulary, meaning a place of tension and conflict (Pulman 1988), we must also consider the risk involving the study of violence in Africa as a challenge or a fascination with exoticised danger, especially when fieldwork in a violent setting is systemically highlighted in spite of physical and psychological risks for the researchers, but also for their assistants and their interlocutors.
SPEAKING BACK TO COLONIALITY: A GENERAL OBSERVATION USING A VARIETY OF AFRICAN CASE STUDIES
“Tell your story until your past stops tearing your present apart” (Mashile, 2016). In these important words uttered by renowned poet, Lebogang Mashile , I welcome you to my paper. The topic of engagement is about coloniality, with a focus on the various ways which coloniality shows up in reality. I have divided my paper into four sub-categories which critically engage coloniality. First, I will define coloniality in conjunction with differentiating it from colonialism or colonisation. Then, I will discuss coloniality of power by using the film Namibia Genocide and the Second Reich (Olusoga, 2004) as an example. Then I will discuss coloniality of being by using the film Once Were Warriors (Tamahori, 1994) an example. I will follow with a discussion on the coloniality of knowledge using the documentary Afrikaaps (Valley, 2010) as an example, before ending my paper with a succinct conclusion.
Exploitation and Misrule in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa
African Histories and Modernities, 2019
This book series serves as a scholarly forum on African contributions to and negotiations of diverse modernities over time and space, with a particular emphasis on historical developments. Specifically, it aims to refute the hegemonic conception of a singular modernity, Western in origin, spreading out to encompass the globe over the last several decades. Indeed, rather than reinforcing conceptual boundaries or parameters, the series instead looks to receive and respond to changing perspectives on an important but inherently nebulous idea, deliberately creating a space in which multiple modernities can interact, overlap, and conflict. While privileging works that emphasize historical change over time, the series will also feature scholarship that blurs the lines between the historical and the contemporary, recognizing the ways in which our changing understandings of modernity in the present have the capacity to affect the way we think about African and global histories.
Constant Questioning on-and-off the Page: Race, Decolonial Ethics, and Women Researching in Africa
Women Researching in Africa: The Impact of Gender (Palgrave), 2019
Drawing from scholarship in feminist political geography that embraces discomfort and unease as generative features of social encounter along with the literature on decolonial ethics for research, Murrey argues that further concrete work is necessary to deconstruct the artificial barriers between ‘the field’/home-site and that this project remains particularly acute for research ‘on Africa’ given its position in a global colonial system. To these ends, Murrey makes three interconnected arguments: (a) ‘women researching in Africa’ are responsible for challenging masculinist and colonial epistemologies. (b) This would mean, among others, moving beyond guilt and compassion to an explicit political consciousness of decolonization. (c) Such a consciousness is centered upon attention to the functions of race, particularly global whiteness and anti-blackness, for research in Africa.
Sources, Materials and Fieldwork in African Studies, 2021
This special issue of "Sources, Materials and Fieldwork in African Studies", contributes to the debates on how to relate to violence in the social sciences and humanities, particularly on the African continent. Violence is a research object with significant emotional, partisan, and ideological power and its study requires a specific questioning about access to fieldwork, ethnographic immersion, the nature of field materials and their conditions of collect. The contributions gathered here focus on varied empirical materials used both as the starting point and basis for the analysis. Through various case studies, they all illustrate the value of making a methodological detour through sources and materials, as well as highlight the multiple ways through which these sources and materials can be produced.
African International Relations, Genocidal Histories and the Emancipatory Project. Part 2
Vestnik RUDN. International Relations, 2020
Silences in the discipline of International Relations on genocide amount to a form of genocide denial, which is one of the foundations of future genocide. The paper posits that in the era of militarized global apartheid, progressive scholars are challenged to critique and expose the past and current crimes against humanity that are occurring in Africa. Drawing from the consolidation of an alternative analysis in the context of the Bandung Project, the paper analyzed the contributions of the ideas that emerged out of the anti-apartheid struggles and the struggles for reparative justice. Struggles from the Global South had culminated in the World Conference against Racism (WCAR) process, elevating the anti-racist battles as a core challenge of Africas International Relations. This rejuvenation and energies coming out of the protracted struggle for bread, peace and justice took the form of the transition to the African Union leaving behind the concept of the noninterference in the inte...
Special Issue 1: Indigenous Perspectives and Counter Colonial Criminology
2014
A clue to the inspiration for this special edition of the African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies can be found in its title, 'Indigenous Perspectives and Counter Colonial Criminologies'. In the late 2000s one of the guest editors' for this edition was advised to read 'Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason' by Nigerian scholar Biko Agozino: a book that a friend and colleague described as "ground-breaking". Biko's papyrus, published in 2003, is considered by many Indigenous and critical justice commentators as a landmark critique of Western criminology (Oriola, 2006; Tauri, 2012a). He aptly describes the discipline as a 'control freak' (Agozino, 2010) whose intellectual origins are grounded in the intersection of Enlightenment scholarship and Western Europe's colonial endeavours of the 18 th and 19 th centuries (Agozino, 2003).