AFRICAN STUDIES CENTER - UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
 

CODESRIA Annual Social Science Campus: Call for Applications for the 2004 Session


Date: Wed, 9 Jun 2004 13:11:53 -0000
From: Jean-Pierre DIOUF

<jean.diouf@codesria.sn>

The CODESRIA Annual Social Science Campus

Call for Applications for the 2004 Session


The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) is pleased to announce the third session of its Annual Social Science Campus, and invites applications from African scholars for participation in the programme which, this year, is scheduled to be held in October 2004. The Annual Social Science Campus is conceived as an advanced research dialogue which is both multidisciplinary and intergenerational in nature. It is organised around a specific theme and up to 15 scholars, drawn from different disciplines and reflecting the different generations of African social researchers, are elected to participate in the Campus. This mix of participants is designed to have the added value of promoting an intensive and critical dialogue among the disciplines, as well as different generations of African scholars for the advancement of theory, methodology and practice. Each Campus is planned as an intensive interactive exercise to last for a period of one week.

Participation in the Campus is based primarily on the submission of a draft research paper which contains ideas for fresh, innovative work or the substantive extension of work that is already in progress and linked to the theme of the Campus. The proceedings of the Campus are managed by a designated coordinator who also takes on the responsibility for elaborating the programme of presentations and debates among the participants. Furthermore, the coordinator, working with the CODESRIA Centre for Documentation (CODICE), will be responsible for identifying core literature for use by the participants in the Campus. Scholars whose proposals are selected would be required to participate in the Campus by presenting their own papers, responding to the papers of other participants, and undertaking a critical reading/re-reading of core texts as part of an intensive multidisciplinary and inter-generational dialogue. At the close of the Campus, participants will be encouraged to revise their presentations and submit these for consideration for publication in a new series known as Annals of the CODESRIA Annual Social Science Campus. Each publication in the series will be edited by the designated coordinator of the campus at which the papers were presented.

For the 2004 session of the Annual Social Science Campus, the theme that has been selected is: The Problematic of the State in Africa. For over two decades now, the African state has been at the heart of intellectual and policy debates touching on virtually all aspects of the experiences and prospects of the continent. The reasons for this preoccupation are diverse, some associated with well-founded concerns about the origins, structure and record of the state, others motivated by a narrow and tendentious anti-statism that sometimes tallies with and/or reinforces a condescending attitude towards everything African. Easily, the African state will qualify for the record of having perhaps the highest number of epithets ever deployed to describe an institution. It has variously been characterised as "overdeveloped", "prebendal", "patrimonial"/"neo-patrimonial", "rentier", "crony", "unsteady", "kleptocratic", "sultanist", "convivial", a "lame leviathan", an "international Bantustan", "shadow", "criminal", "omnipotent but hardly omnipresent", etc. Although the bulk of these epithets have been associated with the public choice approaches and the so-called new political economy school that dominated the discussions on Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, it is equally true that their deployment transcends disciplinary boundaries and their use has been shared by other schools of thought, including those associated with notions of the post-colony. Indeed, arguably, the problematic of the African state is one area of scholarly interest where the lines among the different theoretical approaches for the study of politics, economy and society have been blurred the most. Not a few scholars have noted that this state of affairs reflects the depth of the conceptual and theoretical confusion which exists and which is in urgent need of being redressed. It might also be a measure of the extent to which instrumentalist, market-based policy concerns driven by the World Bank and the IMF have come to dominate the terrain of thinking about the state. The 2004 Session of the Annual Social Science Campus is designed to encourage theoretically-grounded reflections on these questions, with the accent placed on new thinking that can help to advance the debate on the place and role of the state in Africa.

Among the issues which it is hoped that the Campus will cover are:

i A critique of the dominant approaches in the literature to understanding the contemporary African state;

ii A (re-)reading of the historical processes and forces that shape the modern African state;

iii A critique of the logic that drives the African state, makes sense of its workings, and accounts for its performance;

iv The processes by which the state mobilises consent and legitimacy and the contexts in which both consent and legitimacy are eroded and lost;

v A re-thinking of the state in Africa beyond the parameters set by the dominant discourses; and

vi A reflection, in a comparative frame, on the African state and states in other regions of the world.

Scholars who are already reflecting on the problematic of the state in Africa and who have innovative perspectives to share with other researchers and the wider academy are invited to submit their applications to reach the CODESRIA Secretariat not later than 30 September 2004. In addition to a substantive proposal reflecting on-going work on this theme, interested participants should also send their current curriculum vitae. Applications should be sent

to:


The CODESRIA Annual Social Science Campus, Department of Training and Grants,
CODESRIA
Avenue Cheikh Anta Diop x Canal IV
BP 3304
Dakar, 18524
Senegal.
Tel.: +221-8259822/23
Fax.: +221-824 1289
E-mail: <mailto:text.book@codesria.sn>text.book@codesria.sn

Website: <http://www.codesria.org/>www.codesria.org




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