Africa: History, Institutions and Global Challenges

The course aims to provide students with the interpretive tools necessary to understand: 1. The assumptions regarding the formation of the colonial state, 2. The process of decolonization and, then 3. The constituent elements of the independent state in Africa and regional economic communities, realized in the face of domestic problems and global challenges. Those who follow the third teaching unit will be able to delve into a specific regional case study.

Students, at the conclusion of the course, will have understood the impact of the colonial "event" suffered by the different African peoples and their political, economic, social and cultural structures. They are expected to refine some ability in recognizing and articulating the different human reactions to the impact with the different colonial experiences arising from the exportation of the ius publicum europaeum, used to divide the continent

among European powers and aimed at controlling not only the exploitation of land and mineral resources, but also its "human capital." This was classified using categories such as "ethnicity" or "race" in a relationship of cultural judgement and dependence, reproduced through the systematic epistemological annihilation of African cultures that even today produces consequences in the very way Africa is interpreted in the current vulgate in Western countries. They will thus understand the link between the historical legacy of competition for control and management of natural resources in sub-Saharan Africa, from the commodification of human resources to the globalized commodification of resources by the African developmentalist state. The aim of the course is to stimulate in students a capacity for critical and historicized thinking, in analyzing cultural conflicts and institutional stratifications in the past and their consequences in the present: a legitimate expectation in a course incardinated in the third year of an international political science degree program.