Erasure and silence of African political thought in IR

Over the years, the canon of IR theory has increasingly come under fire for the erasure and silencing of non-Western voices.Footnote ¹² Some of the most significant contributions have come from the burgeoning Global IR literature, including contributions from Asian scholars (especially political theorists and philosophers),Footnote ¹³ postcolonial scholars in Latin America,Footnote ¹⁴ Indigenous scholars,Footnote ¹⁵ and African IR scholars, philosophers, political theorists, and revolutionary thinkers.Footnote ¹⁶ In following this work, scholars across the discipline are increasingly recognizing the effects of colonialism on the production and consumption of knowledge. There is an acknowledgement that the silences and distortions in IR scholarship have been driven by theories and pedagogies focused on Euro-American political thought and the presumption of the universality of Western thinking.Footnote ¹⁷

IR presents Euro-American perspectives as universal ideas and knowledge from the Global South as provincial views. Zondi argues that IR feigns universality and internationalism when it is a Eurocentric construction of the international.Footnote ¹⁸ Eurocentrism not only drives theoretical approaches, but it is an empirical form of imperialism, policing the very thinking scholars and philosophers undertake. It distinguishes the rational from the irrational, the publishable from the non-publishable, and it defines careers and reading lists. In presuming such universality, theories and ideas from the Global South, including those of current and historical African thinkers, are often seen as uniquely and solely applicable to the continent, and discussed and taught only within that context. Yet, if we examine the self-professed roots of IR, the mainstream stems almost exclusively from white ‘fathers’ of the discipline: from Thucydides, Hobbes, and Machiavelli, to the important ‘fathers’ of realism (Carr), idealism (Kant), neoliberalism (Smith, Locke, Ricardo), and constructivism (Weber, Durkheim, Bourdieu). Notably, references to the work of women and non-Europeans remain scarce in most such exercises. Scholars such as Kwame Nkrumah, Ibn Khaldun, and Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni rarely feature as part of this canon (and female scholars receive even fewer engagements), despite African scholarship being relevant and applicable globally.

Tuhiwai Smith has written extensively on the implicit rules that researchers follow. These rules are a reflection of the power structures inherent in knowledge production.Footnote ¹⁹ They allow for classification, comparison, and evaluation or ranking of societies. Even dissent or what we think of as critical research implicitly conforms to these rules to various extents. According to the late Mudimbe, African educational institutions are trapped in the ‘colonial library’ in ‘silent dependence on a Western episteme.’Footnote ²⁰ The notion that these rules are implicit makes it all the more difficult (or maybe impossible) for African knowledge producers to fully extract ourselves from them. Furthermore, there is significant reluctance on the part of Western scholars to acknowledge the existence of other epistemes.Footnote ²¹ This is increasingly true even for those whose lived experiences meant exposure to alternative knowledges and worldviews, as Euro-American epistemologies became the standard in education, against which all others are judged. Afolabi points out that ‘the global political economy of knowledge production has consigned Indigenous knowledge to being traditional, unscientific and value-laden. Western knowledge has been prioritized over traditional means of knowledge acquisition.… [This is] regularly justified and sustained by petty African intellectual bourgeoisie.’Footnote ²² This slow erasure, or forced substitution of African epistemes, is what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (Reference wa Thiong’o2005) called epistemicide – the killing of local epistemologies. Grosfoguel puts it in even starker terms, arguing that the entire discipline of IR is built on morally bankrupt processes of epistemicides, cultural murder, and theft of history.Footnote ²³

Calls to escape the entrapment within Mudimbe’s colonial library have taken a number of different forms. Ndlovu-Gatsheni argues that a deliberate exaltation of the previously silenced subaltern knowledges is needed.Footnote ²⁴ Sabaratnam calls for a dialogue between different intellectual traditions and cultures as a decolonizing strategy. She notes that ‘the act of provincialising particular perspectives and introducing the relevance of others is a way of making inquiry itself a dialogue.’Footnote ²⁵ In the present collection, Lina Benabdallah suggests a contrapuntal approach. Similar calls for the acceptance of various ecologies of knowledge, or for a turn away from the ‘monoculture’ of science toward an approach that acknowledges the pluriversality of knowledge, are increasingly being made, signalling a shift away from universalist approaches that survive only when other knowledges die.Footnote ²⁶ Contrapuntal and pluriversal approaches to knowledge are consistent with reminders that there are many Africas – and many ways to combine theory and practice when engaging Africa and its subregions.Footnote ²⁷

Despite these – often invisible – roadblocks and barriers that scholars continue to encounter, the increasing need to address the coloniality of knowledge is clear. Given our own areas of interest in research and teaching, we have seen a gradual change in the literature we read and review, and we have increasingly observed editorial boards of journals working to provide more access to diverse authors. While the topics touched on are by no means new from the perspective of work by many African thinkers who have been writing from a decolonial perspective for many decades,Footnote ²⁸ this turn in IR literature is indeed encouraging. This introductory essay – and indeed the entire collection – builds on both the older and newer work of scholars, contributing to this wave of change. The collection aims to bring these ideas to the forefront in ways that allow for dialogue between mainstream IR and African systems of thought in teaching, research, and theorising.

African systems of thought

African systems of thought refer to Indigenous frameworks of knowledge, sense-making rooted in philosophies, oral traditions, music, dance, proverbs, incantations, wise sayings, dirges, and the lived experience of African peoples.Footnote ²⁹ At the risk of oversimplification and at the most fundamental level, these systems are grounded in a holistic and relational worldview that resists binaries, including rigid distinctions between the spiritual and the material, the individual and the collective, the local and global, the human and non-human, emphasizing their mutual constitution instead.Footnote ³⁰ The African epistemology of holism, for instance, sees humans as intrinsically connected to spirits and nature – an understanding echoed in North American First Nations’ views.Footnote ³¹ These ideas are Indigenous African ideas insofar as they have been articulated, preserved, and transmitted from one generation to the next, some of them long before Africa’s sustained encounters with the West. Molefi Kete Asante asserts that the Egyptian ethicist Ptahhotep (c. 2414 B.C.) was a pioneer in articulating the complex and interconnected relationship between humans and nature. As he puts it, ‘all discourse on the relationship between humans and nature must give credit to the life of Ptahhotep.’Footnote ³² For Asante, African knowledge systems must be understood on their own epistemic terms rather than as derivative, reactive, or supplementary to Western thinking.

While we agree with the premise that African knowledge systems should be treated on their own terms, we reject the notion that any single individual can be regarded as the inventor of a distinct African knowledge system. Rather, African writers, philosophers, and elites function mostly as conduits or transmission belts through which ideas – developed, refined, and sustained by diverse African communities over time – are articulated and circulated. This understanding is consistent with Indigenous African epistemologies, which emphasize the collective rather than the individual as the locus of knowledge production.Footnote ³³ Among the Akans of West Africa, the collective nature of knowledge production is expressed in the proverbs such as, ‘wisdom does not dwell in a single head’ or ‘wisdom is like a baobab tree; no one individual can embrace it,’ while among the Zulus of Southern Africa this idea is captured in the saying, ‘the wisdom of the elder is in the community.’Footnote ³⁴ Numerous adages in Africa underscore the view that knowledge is socially distributed, cumulative, and produced through communal interaction rather than residing in a single person’s mind.Footnote ³⁵

We also do not think that African thought systems exist in binary opposition to other thought systems. Rather, many of these ideas have evolved through centuries of direct and indirect interaction with other cultures and traditions. Even some of these ideas now seen as ‘Indigenous African,’ including concepts such as Pan-Africanism, first appeared in writing and public discourse outside of the African continent. These ideas have been localized, reinterpreted, made contextually relevant to Africans, and claimed by Africans. Just as the major household animals in Africa, such as cattle and goats, first domesticated in Asia, have been indigenized and integrated into African livelihoods and identities, so too have so-called foreign articulated ideas, such as Pan-Africanism. Although first articulated in public discourses in the Americas with racial politics at its core,Footnote ³⁶ Pan-Africanism in Africa has evolved into a unifying popular idea that embraces all races under the principles of solidarity and shared aspiration for a united Africa.Footnote ³⁷ Other systems of thought, such as Ubuntu discussed by Mohamed Sesay, initially emerged as public discourses within local African communities. In other words, the ideas discussed here may have first appeared in everyday language at the community level or elsewhere, but they have been broadly embraced and internalized by many African societies.

For IR, African systems of thought offer valuable lessons. They challenge Eurocentric frameworks and, in many ways, offer alternative pathways of doing IR scholarship. Take, for example, an African-systems-of-thought approach to knowledge attribution, in which knowledge is understood as communally held rather than individually owned. This epistemological orientation challenges the prevailing citation practices in IR, which privilege individual authorship and assign intellectual ownership to specific persons. From an African-systems-of-thought perspective, such practices are misaligned with how knowledge is produced, sustained, and transmitted. They obscure the collective social, historical, and cultural processes through which ideas emerge. Consequently, citation practices may need to be rethought to reflect collective authorship, where those credited are understood not as owners of knowledge, but rather as contributors, articulators, or transmitters of insights that are socially embedded and communally generated. In this sense, attribution in IR scholarship would shift away from individual ownership toward recognition of broader knowledge communities, traditions, and lived experiences that give rise to particular ideas. Thus, rather than attributing to Thucydides the original formulation of the structural explanation of interstate conflict, or crediting him as the singular ‘father’ of realism, an African-systems-of-thought perspective would suggest the ideas articulated in The Peloponnesian War may not have originated with Thucydides himself but rather reflected circulating understandings that already existed within Greek society, which he helped to record and transmit. Moreover, these ideas need not have been exclusively Greek in origin. Given the dense and longstanding interconnections among ancient societies, particularly among the Greeks and Romans, Asians – as well as Africans such as Ethiopians, Egyptians, and Nubians – it is not inconceivable that such ideas may have originated elsewhere and travelled across regions through trade, diplomacy, conquest, and intellectual exchange before being articulated in written form in Greece at that historical moment. An African-systems-of-thought approach to international relations would therefore reframe Thucydides not as the originator of these ideas, but as one among many contributors or transmitters within a broader, transregional knowledge ecology.

The understanding of knowledge attribution within African Indigenous systems of thought should not be read as provincial or exceptional. Similar arguments have been advanced in other parts of the world, particularly by Indigenous scholars, critical Asian scholars, and even policymakers. The argument is similar to those made by Global South activists and negotiators who have long challenged Western liberal conceptions of intellectual property embedded in the World Trade Organization that privilege individual ownership, originality, and authorship.Footnote ³⁸ They advocate for alternative frameworks that recognize knowledge as collectively produced, socially embedded, and intergenerationally transmitted.Footnote ³⁹ These critiques have been especially prominent in debates over Indigenous knowledge, cultural heritage, and intellectual property rights, where scholars argue that dominant legal and academic regimes systematically misrecognize communal knowledge systems.Footnote ⁴⁰ Read in this broader comparative context, African Indigenous epistemologies are not provincial forms of knowing, but part of a wider global movement calling for a redefinition of ideas such as intellectual property and knowledge attribution that better reflects diverse epistemic traditions and lived realities.

Another area where African systems of thought offer a fundamentally different way of thinking about IR is the conceptions of political community, which privilege humans over territory. Fixed territorial delimitations and exclusive control over land were largely alien to most pre-colonial African societies. As Englebert, Tarango, and Carter (Reference Englebert, Stacy and Matthew2002) explain, political systems in pre-colonial Africa did not require territorial control because populations were relatively small and land was abundant. Political authority and success, therefore, depended primarily on control over people rather than land, in contrast to the European experience.

Despite the widespread diffusion of geo-epistemology in Africa, its norm of territorial integrity and the practical expansion of state policing of movement of Africans in the post-colonial period, fixed borders and exclusive territorial sovereignty continue to hold limited resonance for many cultural groups across Africa.Footnote ⁴¹ This is evident in the practices and social organization of diverse communities, including the Berbers in the North, the Fulanis in the East, the Hausas in the West, the Chewas in the Centre, and the Khoisan in the South.Footnote ⁴² The marginal relevance of Westphalian sovereignty is thus not confined to any single region or community, but cuts across multiple societies and cultural formations throughout the African continent. In Africa, where land has been historically abundant rather than scarce, the organizing principle of political organization continues to be the regulation of social relations rather than territorial control. Political community continues to be constituted through human relationships, obligations, and social bonds – rather than fixed borders. Authority, belonging, and order are therefore grounded in human-centred logics rather than a land-first approach to political organizations.

This stands in sharp contrast to dominant disciplinary IR conceptions of political community, which emerged from the European historical experience of land scarcity. In that context, territorial control became the primary basis of political authority, rendering sovereignty, borders, and exclusive territorial jurisdiction foundational concepts in the discipline. From the perspective of African systems of thought, however, this geo-epistemological foundation is neither universal nor even normal but reflects a contingent and provincial European experience. The human relations, rather than territorial connections, constitute the primary unit of political life and should therefore anchor the study of international life.

Following this logic, core IR concepts such as territorial integrity, sovereignty, security, and even peace acquire markedly different meanings. Peace is not understood merely as the absence of war between states or the protection of territorial integrity, but as the absence of violence within and among humans, communities, and social relations. This human-centred conception challenges statist and territorial readings of the ‘international’ and invites a reconceptualization of security, order, and justice. From an African systems of thought perspective, the absence of war between states, especially the major powers, since 1945 is insufficient to characterize the post-World War II period as either peaceful or a ‘long peace.’ Similarly, victor-driven and retributive conceptions of justice that have shaped the post-1945 international order are inadequate. As Mohamed Sesay’s contribution indicates, the restoration of shared humanity and the repair of social relations – rather than retribution – constitute the core function of justice in African systems of thought. Had these ideas been central rather than marginal to the formation of IR, many of the field’s dominant concepts, including the privileging of interstate competition, would likely have evolved differently. Indeed, African systems of thought draw attention to a range of concepts, ideas, and levels of analysis that, if taken seriously, would enrich IR as a discipline. They offer critical resources for decolonizing IR and for rethinking international political life in ways that more fully reflect the totality of human experience, rather than centring the discipline on the violent trajectories of European historical experiences. The six contributing essays take up this concern by examining how concepts drawn from African systems of thought can, in specific and concrete ways, enhance the discipline of IR.

Summary of contributions

We begin with the question of how best to read African systems of thought in relation to mainstream IR. Lina Benabdallah draws on the concept of contrapuntal to argue that African systems of thought should not be approached hierarchically. Instead, they are better understood as operating side by side with mainstream IR traditions, intersecting in some areas while clearly diverging in others. Drawing on Edward Said’s work and using the Africa Rising narrative alongside its Afro-pessimist counter-narrative as a site of perpetual deviance, she demonstrates how contrapuntalism can be operationalized both as a method and as an ethos of IR scholarship. The adoption of contrapuntalism as a method and as an ethos of IR scholarship will mean that African ways of knowing do not require translation into, or validation through, Eurocentric equivalences to be legitimate. Instead, their epistemic authority comes from the historical, social, and relational contexts within which they are produced and lived.

Nadège Compaoré takes up the issue of the intersection between African systems of thought and Western ideas. She suggests that, in some cases, because of the intimate historical relationship between Europe (and the West more broadly) and Africa, even core African systems of thought concepts are also shaped by the Western knowledge system. As a result, many of the African concepts cannot be fully understood without also taking the Western archive into consideration. More importantly, she interrogates what a system of thought is for and what purpose it is meant to serve. She argues that African systems of thought, such as Pan-Africanism and Black internationalism, are not problem-solving ideas.Footnote ⁴³ Rather, they should be understood as forms of activism; intellectual exercises that seek to change or transform the international system to reflect the experiences of Africans. In this sense, drawing on Robert Cox’s well-known question, theory for whom and for what purpose, Compaoré suggests that within African systems of thought, ideas are intended to push for social transformation. They are not designed merely to explain social realities or to justify existing policies or actions, as is often the case in mainstream IR scholarship.

Evelyn Mayanja and Afua Boatemaa Yakohene take on the task of addressing what mainstream IR scholars can learn from Afrocentric Indigenous Knowledge Systems (AIKS). They acknowledge that the concept of indigeneity is deeply controversial in the African context. This is not only because the term has historically been deployed by European intellectuals in a pejorative and stereotyped manner to mean traditional, archaic, static, unchanging, and uncivilized practices, but also because of the epistemic violence embedded in the way it was used. Despite this, they argue that the concept of indigeneity is still analytically powerful if defined properly and in a context-sensitive way. Focusing on AIKS’ perspective on the individual and kinship as an analytical entry point, they ask what kinds of IR knowledge and practices would emerge if AIKS were brought into genuine dialogue with – and more fully integrated into – mainstream IR scholarship. They contend that such an engagement would render the field of IR more humane, as AIKS foregrounds relationality, community care, and the restoration of shared humanity rather than the conflict-oriented, competitive, self-seeking, power-hungry, and aggressive attributes that have long dominated the field and been normalized within the discipline.

Mohamed Sesay follows it up with a careful discussion of what will happen if mainstream IR looks at justice from an African-systems-of-thought perspective. How different might the understanding and application of the concept of justice be in IR scholarship if African systems of thought had been centred in the field? He argues that in IR conceptualization, justice is much more punitive and retributive. However, in African systems of thought, justice is much more focused on restoring human dignity and human relationships. This reconceptualization has profound implications not only for how international life is understood, but also for how international order and peace are imagined. From this perspective, international peace is less about interstate harmony or respect for the territorial integrity of states and more about the restoration and maintenance of social harmony among humans, as well as within and across communities. In African systems of thought, the state is an instrument of humans, while in traditional IR scholarship, humans are instruments of the state.

Peace Medie shifts attention to gender by asking what forms of knowledge would emerge if African feminist systems of thought were placed at the centre of analysis. She argues that although gender has been discussed within IR scholarship, African feminist thinking remains underexplored. African feminist thinking, she suggests, places greater emphasis on African women’s lived experiences, community context, intersubjectivity, and social relations – and in doing so redirects analytical attention away from the state and the international system toward domestic processes and human relations. From an African feminist perspective, the state is not viewed as the protector of women; rather, it is often a major source of insecurity and violence against women. The state not only reinforces patriarchy and gender-based violence but also essentializes and polices what it means to be a female within African societies. Medie’s intervention opens analytical space to examine actors and processes that have largely been ignored in mainstream IR scholarship, including non-state actors such as religious leaders, queenmothers, and chiefs, who have historically been central to both peacebuilding and the governance of gender relations on the African continent.

The last essay explores the issue of pedagogy, which can be vexing owing to its personalized or idiosyncratic nature and subject to logistical and professional constraints. As much as IR pedagogy is vexing, it is a venue to foment change by disrupting norms, conventions, and traditions.Footnote ⁴⁴ Fikir Haile and Badriyya Yusuf contribute to the latter by offering answers to the following question: What kinds of materials are available and can be developed to teach IR in ways that meaningfully centre African knowledge systems? Haile and Yusuf highlight the fact that Euro-American IR thinking has been sustained and reproduced through well-resourced and carefully curated knowledge ecosystems. In contrast, materials that centre African knowledge systems are often either absent altogether in major libraries or buried within voluminous texts, rendering them difficult to locate and access in many academic institutions. Haile and Yusuf examine the specific processes through which they assembled extensive knowledge banks containing core texts and teaching materials that can be used to teach IR to reflect African knowledge systems. The authors argue that if IR is to be taught differently and more inclusively, institutional support is indispensable. Too often, the labour of diversifying curricula is placed on younger scholars and, in particular, racialized scholars – who undertake this work without recognition or compensation. The paper calls for robust institutional structures that recognize, reward, and support the time and intellectual labour required to develop teaching materials that broaden the IR canon and work toward a more equitable and genuinely global discipline.

Concluding remarks

In a nutshell, the essays join a growing chorus of IR scholars who argue that the discipline would benefit from stepping beyond its Euro-American bubble by demonstrating how African systems of thought can enrich it when taken seriously. We argue that African systems of thought constitute just one of many avenues through which the discipline can move beyond its Euro-American gaze to engage more seriously with ideas, practices, beliefs, and lived experiences of societies elsewhere in the world. Inspired by the reflexive humility advocated by Compaoré et al. (Reference Compaoré, Martel and Grant2022), the symposium shows, to a limited extent, how mainstream IR can be decolonized in ways that are intellectually productive. We do not present this symposium as a ‘final word’ but as an epistemological catalyst and prompt for mainstream IR scholars to engage more meaningfully with voices and perspectives emerging from non-Euro-American locales and intellectual traditions.