CODESRIA: The CODESRIA Annual Social Science Campus,
10/04
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:
-
A critique of the dominant approaches in the
literature to understanding the contemporary African state;
-
A (re-)reading of the historical processes and forces
that shape the modern African state;
-
A critique of the logic that drives the African state,
makes sense of its workings, and accounts for its performance;
-
The processes by which the state mobilises consent and
legitimacy and the contexts in which both consent and legitimacy are eroded
and lost;
-
A re-thinking of the state in Africa beyond the
parameters set by the dominant discourses; and
-
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,
Av Cheikh Anta Diop x Canal IV
BP 3304,
Dakar, 18524
Senegal.
Tel: +221-8259822/23
Fax:+221-8241289
E-mail: annual.campus@codesria.sn <mailto:annual.campus@codesria.sn>
Website: www.codesria.org <http://www.codesria.org/>
Page Editor: Ali B. Ali-Dinar, Ph.D.