Project Details
Projekt
African Regional Economic Communities (RECs) in Global Politics
Applicant
Dr. Jens Herpolsheimer
Subject Area
Political Science
African, American and Oceania Studies
African, American and Oceania Studies
Term
since 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 536665616
The recent re-emergence of coups d’états in Africa, the continued spread of violent extremism and terrorism, and the growing Russian geopolitical influence, along with historical challenges for socio-economic development on the continent, have put African and Western political actors alike before fundamental questions. Along with the Covid-19 pandemic and responses to Russia’s war in Ukraine these dynamics have powerfully demonstrated, not only the complexity of contemporary globalization processes and specifically global security, but also the critical relevance of various actors around the globe in ongoing efforts to re-order the world – including actors from the Global South, and specifically including African actors. Due to the transnational character of these challenges, African regional organizations (ROs) in particular have become important actors and key fora to discuss, negotiate and coordinate regional and global responses. As a consequence, the need for scientific knowledge on African ROs has dramatically increased. Therefore, this project studies the role of African ROs in shaping and implementing highly inter-related and securitized regional/global policy fields, that is policy fields that are simultaneously of regional and global concern and that involve actors and practices that simultaneously operate at these different, inter-related scales. Specifically, it focuses on the Regional Economic Communities (RECs) that the African Union formally recognizes as key partners and building blocks in developing and implementing regional/global policies. Studying the six most active RECs, across four key policy fields (i.e., climate change, migration, health, and energy), the project closes a large gap in existing research, which still struggles to highlight, differentiate and theorize the agency of African ROs in defining and confronting global challenges. This helps to establish a broad empirical basis for cooperative political action, and advance key theoretical debates in International Relations (IR) scholarship, specifically in the intersecting academic fields of Comparative Regionalism, Inter-Regionalism and Inter-Organizational Relations, as well as Global Governance. In this way, the project lays important groundwork for achieving more global comparability and generalizability, overcoming Western/Euro-centric perspectives, and thus advances theory-oriented research towards a more global IR.
DFG Programme
Independent Junior Research Groups
International Connection
Belgium, Ethiopia, Netherlands, Senegal, Sweden, United Kingdom
