Politique Africaine: "Analyzing Africa from the bottom up"

Founded in 1980 by Jean-François Bayart alongside a dozen other researchers - including several members of Sciences Po’s Center for International Studies (CERI) - Politique Africaine has always striven to offer a novel perspective on Africa, one which is both more inventive and grassroots-oriented. Publication director Sandrine Perrot spoke to us about the vision and editorial direction of the journal, one that has been supported by Sciences Po since day one.

What was the context underlying Politique africaine? What were the aims for the journal at the time of its creation?

Politique africaine is an editorial venture lead by young researchers. CERI’s Jean-François Bayart, accompanied by his colleagues analysing popular modes of political action, as well as Christian Coulon at the Centre d'études d'Afrique noire in Bordeaux, François Constantin in Pau, Jean Copans, Jean-François Médard, Marie-Claude Smouts, Yves-André Fauré, Alain Ricard, Rob Buijtenhuijs, etc., had all just been recruited and were craving categorical and political emancipation.

It is important to remember that, at the time, African studies were in the process of being created. On the one hand, there was an anthropology strongly marked by the colonial experience, and on the other hand, there were social sciences that did not really take Africa into account, leaving it by the wayside as an exotic terrain that was more of an exception than a case study to be considered.

When the journal was founded, the idea was to break with the Africanist vision of yesteryear, marked by the political meddling of the Françafrique personal networks in science and political sociology journals focused on Africa. We were also intent on breaking down both physical barriers and the barriers between disciplines. The journal was staffed by internationalists, anthropologists, political scientists, geographers, and other scholars.

Above all, we were driven by the idea of looking at Africa in a different way, by placing those concerned at the center of the analysis and taking an interest in the daily life of power relations and how they manifest in social practices.

It was a matter of taking a bottom up approach, or more precisely, of creating a dialogue between the top and the bottom in order to free ourselves from overhanging analyses and thus break with a knowledge of Africa that was at that time dominated by lawyers, particularly constitutionalists. The latter had often been asked by the young independent African states to write their constitutions, and they had extremely formal analyses of the state. Politique africaine is a journal that, on the contrary, attaches great importance to lived realities on the ground.

The revue has consistently aimed to break outside of mainstream conceptions and to renew the approach to the subject matter. During Roland Marchal’s tenure directing the journal, for example, we published a tremendous number of articles on conflicts, on their sociological aspects, with a constant desire to decentralize viewpoints and to provide field analyses that ultimately ran counter to prominent theories on warfare.

I could also mention the various debates we have fostered regarding civic life, with, for example, issues devoted to street parliaments or the issue on the materiality of the vote, or even the issue 100 "Cosmopolis : de la ville, de l'Afrique et du monde".

Our persistent aim was to shift the focus of the debate back onto matters that lay outside the realm of political science, and thus to re-envision traditionally researched issues in a more innovative way.

In what ways has this editorial vision endured?

This heuristic ambition has remained the same. It is no longer a question of normalising Africa or of bringing it into the field of social sciences. Today still, we are driven by a mindfulness of budding new ideas on the continent. We pay particular attention to the writing of young researchers, because they are the ones who can truly provide fresh perspectives on new research topics. We recently published an issue that includes a republication of the major work of the Cameroonian philosopher Eboussi Boulaga, which is highly critical of continental philosophical practices in order to rethink Africa’s existential and political future. We have devoted another issue to Fanon's thought in current social demands. The issues on the ordinariness of madness and on African prisons each constitute an original contribution to the scientific debate on Africa.

It's more important than ever to seek a permanent renewal of views because we are living in an extremely vibrant time for African studies, with new authors and even a resurgence of the debate on "who gets to write about Africa?" "Who's driving the conversation about Africa, and at whom is said conversation directed?"

I am obviously referring to the various debates on decolonizing knowledge, which has left us feeling slightly alienated, because I think that this debate reifies authors' origins and their legitimacy or illegitimacy as writers.

But this debate is still of great interest because the issue of publishing knowledge on Africa, of the venues where such knowledge is produced, is fundamental.

What challenges will the journal have to overcome in the coming years to maintain this identity?

Our main challenge will be to maintain the journal's emphasis on empirical work - that is to say, our capacity to build our analyses on real-life experience, because access to the field has become very difficult, firstly due to the past two years' Covid restrictions, but also because of the authoritarian clamping down of certain regimes. And this has been noted quite significantly. So the question that we have to be really careful about is how do we continue to do fieldwork? How can we keep working with researchers on the ground, increasingly hounded by the regimes in power, constrained in their research, unable to say or write what they choose?

Then, if the challenge in Europe is no longer so much that of disciplinary boundaries or political interference (although vigilance remains necessary), it is now that of the contractualization of projects and research funding. These modes of financing, which are increasingly private, have an impact on the choice of our objects of study and, above all, on the way in which we carry out our research.

Another challenge is that of the increasingly standardized metrics for assessing careers, researchers and articles. When we look at Politique africaine's maiden issues - Jean-François Bayart liked to say that it was very "jumbled", that is to say that we had short and lengthy texts, essays, heated opinion pieces, debates, interviews, documents, and so forth - we offered readers immensely diverse article formats, and now we're fighting hard to resist the standardizing of scientific articles, to keep the leeway we have to publish something different, texts that are sometimes a bit more polemical, shorter texts, papers, and so forth. It also really comes down to a desire to sustain the diversity of knowledge, viewpoints and avenues for expressing them.

The real question underlying all of this is therefore that of the circulation of knowledge, academic traditions and places of knowledge production. This is, of course, a question that goes beyond the scope of our journal: I am referring to the effects of the profound structural inequalities between African and European universities in terms of the means of knowledge production and support for research, particularly in French-speaking African universities whose budgets have been undermined by structural adjustment plans since the 1980s. Not to mention the difficulties in obtaining visas that reduce the mobility of researchers on the continent, which is an issue of consistent struggle.

It seems essential to us to help maintain scientific exchange and the liveliness and diversity of the social sciences within our journal by enabling meetings, debates, and also by helping to shift their center. For example, for the 40th anniversary of Politique Africaine, we began to set up debates on the African continent itself in order to present our work, but also to generate discussions that could lead to publication in our journal. We have also facilitated—in partnership with local universities in Morocco, Senegal, Cameroon, and Côte d'Ivoire—writing workshops for young researchers who otherwise would not necessarily have editorial support to do so. This is another matter of note. Several members of our editorial board and one of our editors teach in a university on the African continent.

Debates on issues, the animation of scientific discussions, conversations surrounding academic traditions, the testing of theories in relevant African territories, are all part of our idea of building a living science and the permanent intellectual reinvention of the journal. These types of collaboration are, without a doubt, an essential element in the common and continuous construction of knowledge and in the diversity of its production.

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