Suchergebnisse

Este artigo examina o que chamamos de historiografia de Relações Internacionais (RI) da África, uma avaliação da contribuição de acadêmicos africanos para o estudo da história e da disciplina de RI. Faz-se isso com base no mito que cerca a historiografia das RI, o papel bastante limitado das contribuições africanas e um conjunto de critérios retirados dos trabalhos de Schmidt e Bell sobre a escrita das RI. Embora reconheçam as RI de Hoffmann como uma ciência social americana, eles sugerem que a historiografia de um campo deve destacar perspectivas obscuras, pesquisadores que professam conscientemente as RI como sua disciplina e instituições que contribuem para o desenvolvimento da disciplina. Embora estudiosos das RI africanos atendam a alguns desses critérios, incluindo instituições e acadêmicos que se autodeclaram como acadêmicos de RI, a hegemonia americana e seu concorrente europeu cúmplice no campo influenciam muito os escritos acadêmicos africanos e as práticas que adotam no estudo das relações internacionais. Enquanto acadêmicos africanos trazem perspectivas africanas sobre questões globais para descobrirem o que eles fazem, eles respondem principalmente a tons teóricos, metodológicos e práticos estabelecidos em outros lugares, alguns até mesmo contrariando essas visões dominantes de teorias "importadas", sem necessariamente desenvolver filosoficamente fundamentados estudos sobre RI na perspectiva africana. Consequentemente, embora as contribuições africanas para a disciplina e história da RI pareçam marginais, os escritores africanos de RI podem expandir seus impactos explorando a disciplina da História - uma visão que representa a natureza eclética da RI - e basear-se na história e nos eventos africanos para fornecer dados teóricos e filosóficos e insights empíricos para o estudo de RI na África. Embora a teoria pós-colonial seja um exemplo de tal reflexão, os estudiosos africanos de relações internacionais farão contribuições significativas para o campo por meio da introspecção, em vez de dependerem dos cânones orientados para o Ocidente.

Securitization theory (ST) makes an insightful and significant contribution to security studies. Through the use of discursive speech act, ST provides an innovative strategy for understanding the application of security's distinctive character and dynamics to any issue in order to make it a security issue. Valuable as the theory is to security studies, the subaltern appear missing in existing securitization analyses. Even when the subaltern are examined, for instance in critiques of classical ST, they are conceived and presented as passive, lacking agency, voice, and power, and suffering from security silence problem. ST's reliance on discursive speech act and focus on state political elite prevent it from capturing the subaltern and subaltern securitization process. Furthermore, while existing ST and critiques of securitization studies offer some direction regarding how the subaltern actors may securitize threats to their security, these perspectives are incidental and grossly underdeveloped. In order to resolve this problem, the current study takes a novel approach to securitization studies by investigating how subaltern actors engage in securitizing discourses and practices. By combining the Fanonian decolonial theory of emancipatory violence, where the nature of the (post)colonial context becomes visible with the theoretical insights of ST, the study shows that the subaltern are able to securitize using protest and violence. The subaltern use protest and violence to show their perception and identification of security threats, mobilize the subaltern audience, and challenge and confront the threatening subject – often times, the subaltern's significant audience – to ensure that action is taken on issues concerning subaltern security. In addition to discourse, therefore, protest and violence serve as the subaltern's instruments of political communication used by the subaltern to move issues beyond normal to the point of extraordinary politics. Consequently, protest and violence can force audiences – including the common people and the political elite – to imagine threats to subaltern security, typically perceived but sometimes real, and accept subaltern securitization moves, and where possible take actions that may amount to an alteration or a change in the order of things. Such change may either be in favour of subaltern's perception of security or not. To uncover the essential dynamics of subaltern securitization, this study synthesizes a version of decolonial theory with elements of existing ST and focuses on the subaltern actors from below the state in Nigeria, a non-Western, postcolonial context. The results reveal that subaltern securitization is possible when members of the subaltern successfully mobilize themselves to collectively identify (real or perceived) threat to their security and in so doing challenging and confronting the threat. This makes their security concerns an issue of priority. The study concludes that desirable as subaltern securitization may be, especially to the subaltern, there is a tendency for subaltern securitization to obfuscate the danger that may lurk around subaltern's attempts to securitize certain issues.