Fudan-LSE Lecture Series No.55

Title: 

Uneven Development and Politics within African Countries: Regional Tensions around New Growth Models

Speaker: 

Prof. Catherine Boone, London School of Economics and Political Science

Host: 

Prof. Yijia Jing, IGPP, Fudan University

Discussant:

Prof. Dwayne Woods, College of Liberal Arts, Purdue University

Prof. Yu Zheng, School of International Relations & Public Affairs, Fudan University

Time: 

12:00-13:20 (Beijing Time), April 26th

Venue: 

Room 805E, 8thFloor，West Sub-building of Guanghua Towers

Please click the link to sign up

The Speaker：

Catherine Boone is Professor of Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and holds a PhD in Political Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Her research focuses on questions of comparative political economy. She is author of Inequality and Political Cleavage in Africa: Regionalism by Design (2024), Property and Political Order: Land Rights and the Structure of Conflict in Africa (2014); Political Topographies of the African State: Territorial Authority and Institutional Choice (2003), Merchant Capital and the Roots of State Power in Senegal (1993), and book chapters and articles.  She convened the LSE MSc program in Africa Development from 2014-2020.  She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020 and to the British Academy in 2021.  She has convened the LSE-UCL Land Politics Working Group since 2015.

Abstract: 

This talk draws upon Inequality and Political Cleavage in Africa (Cambridge, 2024) to trace the roots of strong regionalism within African countries, arguing that this arises from both economic geography and the structure of political institutions.  In many African countries, we see forms of regionalism and territorial politics that are observed in spatially-divided countries around the world. Strong regional inequalities give rise to policy divides that are typical of territorially-divided countries. These arise around redistributive policy, sectoral policy, problems of national market integration, and constitutional design.  This talk links these tensions to strains within African countries around new 21st century growth models based on new export sectors, extractives, and infrastructure development, as promoted by new and old development partners including China, other Global South countries, and the EU and US. Examples are drawn from Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Côte d’Ivoire, among others.