Dimensions of Race, Class and Gender in Policy Development by the African Union and European Union. A Conversation with Katharina Döring (SFB 1199, Leipzig U)

Abstract

This week’s SFB colloquium will engage with practices of policy development and how dimensions of race, class, and gender, among other things, shape them.

Relations between the European Union (EU) and the African Union (AU) as well as policy development and implementation between these organizations, also described as interregionalism, have often focused on the primacy of European institutions as well as on economic exchange. Recently, this relationship has transformed to prominently include issues of peace and security, most visibly reflected in the launch of the Joint Africa-EU Strategy (JAES) in Lisbon in 2007.

In order to dissect the politics of seemingly “neutral” or “formalized” policy development, it is essential to unravel the everyday practices and choices by policy-makers. The agency of these Eurocrats and “Africrats” (a term loosely borrowed from Thomas Kwasi Tieku) enacts the structural characteristics of their respective institutions. As they are embedded in various national and international discourses concerning the “identity triad”, emphasizing dimensions of race, class, and gender is a fruitful avenue to approach this group of actors.

Moreover, by analysing the practices of policy development this discussion will consider the processes of spatialization that accompany the EU’s and AU’s politics towards peace and security. Currently this can be observed, for example, in the different “Strategies for the Sahel” by the EU and AU respectively, which each present a different idea of where and what the “Sahel” is and how to address concerns over instability and security. In such situations, the EU-AU interregional relationship is confronted with the organizations’ different regional projects.

In this session of the SFB Colloquium, Prof. Dr. Toni Haastrup, from the University of Kent, who has published widely on EU-Africa relations, will discuss her recent work in a brief input presentation. Thereafter, Katharina Döring (SFB 1199, Project B7) will engage her in a panel interview inter alia on practices of policy-“making” and mediation as the “Cinderella” of the EU’s peace and security institutions.

Biographical Notes

Prof. Dr. Toni Haastrup (School of Politics and International Relations, University of Kent, UK)
Toni Haastrup is a lecturer in international security and a deputy director of the Global Europe Centre (GEC). She joined the University of Kent in 2013. Prior to this, she was a fellow in the politics and international studies department at the University of Warwick. The focus of her current research interests is on the gender dynamics and processes of institutional transformation within regional security institutions.

Katharina Döring (SFB 1199 & Institute for African Studies, Leipzig University, Germany)
Katharina Döring is a doctoral student at Leipzig University (Germany) and researcher at the SFB project B7 investigating new regionalisms and violent conflict in Africa. She studied within the Erasmus Mundus MA programme “Global Studies – A European Perspective” at the universities of Leipzig, Addis Ababa, and Roskilde and focused on international studies, new political geography, and global history. Currently, she explores the potential of a space-sensitive perspective for understanding the responses of the African Union (AU) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) towards the Malian crisis in 2012.

Image Source: U Kent, Link (7 May 2018)