Africa-EU relations: Cooperation, coloniality, geopolitical contestation

Relations between Africa and Europe can no longer be analyzed in a silo of liberal rhetoric. Both within and around the purported intercontinental ‘partnership’, a plethora of trends are tearing at the seams of established partnership routines. International development cooperation is fundamentally put in question on both sides of the partnership and a push towards financialization. The diversification of partnerships on the African continent simultaneously pits the EU against a wide range of alternative approaches, and this geopolitical competition lays bare growing gaps between rhetoric and reality both in Europe and Africa. This panel examines how these transformations interact with long-standing asymmetries and colonial legacies in Africa-EU relations. The panel asks what forms of cooperation are emerging, whose agency this cooperation enables, and which hierarchies they reproduce or question.
Contributions to this panel will examine themes including economic and development relations, peace, security and defence, migration and mobility, climate and energy, democracy and global multilateralism. Within these empirical themes, the panel takes an interest in innovative theoretical perspectives that explain how extant institutional arrangements fare given the pursuit of greater African agency, the growing politicization of colonial legacies and race in the partnership, and the ways in which actors mobilize geopolitics in the diplomacy of the Africa-EU partnership. A dialogue between critical perspectives and mainstream arguments is particularly encouraged.