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The discipline of International Relations and cognate fields of Comparative Politics and Development Studies have more or less successfully contained the study of Africa's condition within the limits of the dominant Western imagination, with grave consequences. Africa is seen and analyzed as a site of weak states and neopatrimonial rule. The continued dominance and ubiquity of such analytical vocabularies and their underlying methods rests on many forces, one of which is the reluctance to acknowledge that Africans can and do articulate their own analyses of their condition and to respect such analyses. This article seeks to remember some of the routinely forgotten international relations which structure Africa's contemporary condition, by turning to the work of Cameroonian film director Jean-Marie Teno. Teno's work, in particular Afrique Je Te Plumerai and Le Malentendu Colonial, is profoundly important for students of international relations. This article examines the content, form, and effect of the critique Teno elaborates in Afrique Je Te Plumerai.

The discipline of International Relations and cognate fields of Comparative Politics and Development Studies have more or less successfully contained the study of Africa's condition within the limits of the dominant Western imagination, with grave consequences. Africa is seen and analyzed as a site of weak states and neopatrimonial rule. The continued dominance and ubiquity of such analytical vocabularies and their underlying methods rests on many forces, one of which is the reluctance to acknowledge that Africans can and do articulate their own analyses of their condition and to respect such analyses. This article seeks to remember some of the routinely forgotten international relations which structure Africa's contemporary condition, by turning to the work of Cameroonian film director Jean-Marie Teno. Teno's work, in particular Afrique Je Te Plumerai and Le Malentendu Colonial, is profoundly important for students of international relations. This article examines the content, form, and effect of the critique Teno elaborates in Afrique Je Te Plumerai. Adapted from the source document.

Scholars of global governmentality and the neo/liberal project in Africa have exposed the ambitions of change directed at individual, institutional, societal, political and economic levels contained within international development policies. This article examines international agendas and interventions in the realm of housing and urban governance in Africa, as a distinct component of broader ambitions to build liberal states and civil societies. International development policy today includes a specific focus on African cities, most visible in 'slum upgrading' policies. In order to reveal the politics and specificity of current international urban policy the article traces a longer trajectory of the mentality and ambition of Western powers with regard to the government of African cities, from one of racial exclusion to homeownership on the basis of self-help and in a framework of private property relations and market provision -- the core building blocks of a liberal social order. Adapted from the source document.

The current world order is characterised by profound global inequality, depicted through reference to the developed and developing world. The racialised character of global inequalities in power is rarely acknowledged, however. Explicit racial discourse has been removed from the institutional form of the modern world order, and this apparent transcendence of race is mirrored in the lack of attention to race within mainstream scholarship in International Relations (IR). This is in part because of the empiricist assumptions underlying much IR scholarship, which reflect the non-racialised appearance of the modern world order. While the question of race has been exposed by critical strands of IR scholarship, such critiques have focused largely on discursive dimensions of race. This article argues that critical analysis of global racism and racial oppression must go beyond the limits of discursive critique. It is necessary to grasp the non-discursive dimensions of racial power, in order to explain the reproduction of racial inequality by an international order formally committed to racial equality. This, in turn, requires an expanded theory of social ontology. Critical realism develops a theory of social ontology which provides a basis for differentiating between various dimensions of racial oppression. The critical realist theory of social ontology highlights the significance of the relations structuring societal interaction with nature, which are fundamental in determining distributions of social power within society. A survey of the long global history of colonialism reveals that the relations structuring societal interaction with nature on a global scale have been built upon a basis of racialised dispossession. The article argues that the racialised structures of social power produced through centuries of colonial dispossession remain entrenched, despite the formal transcendence of racism in modern institutions of international order. Thus a realist ontology provides the basis for revealing the endurance of race in the structures of international order.

A review essay on a book by Sean Creaven, Marxism and Realism: A Materialistic Application of Realism in the Social Sciences (London: Routledge Studies in Critical Realism, 2000).

In the 21 st century a vast number of people in Africa are direct producers, working very hard on the land to gain a meagre living -- they are the 'rural poor'. The condition of poverty in Africa is widely portrayed in both academic and popular discourse as a result of local factors, whether political, social, cultural or natural. This article argues for an historical materialist approach which exposes the condition of widespread routine poverty and malnutrition in Africa to be a modern world-historical product, the outcome of five centuries of global capitalist expansion under relations of imperialism.

In the 21st century, a vast number of people in Africa are direct producers, working very hard on the land to gain a meager living -- they are the 'rural poor.' The condition of poverty in Africa is widely portrayed in both academic & popular discourse as a result of local factors, whether political, social, cultural, or natural. This article argues for a historical materialist approach that exposes the condition of widespread routine poverty & malnutrition in Africa to be a modern world-historical product, the outcome of five centuries of global capitalist expansion under relations of imperialism. 22 References. Adapted from the source document.