Africa in IPE theorization: exclusion, oversight, and Eurocentrism in the field’s past and future

Abstract

In January 2021, the largest free trade area in the world measured by number of participating countries came into effect. This African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), which links 54 countries and 1.3 billion people, is designed to foster rapid economic growth and pull tens of millions of people out of poverty. Despite the fact that this project raises issues central to International Political Economy (IPE) scholarship, major journals in the field including Review of International Political Economy (RIPE) have given it negligible attention. The paper begins by asking why the AfCFTA has remained at best, marginal, and at worst, absent in the IPE literature. Drawing on the critical and postcolonial literature in the field to address this question, the paper identifies IPE’s Eurocentrism as the root cause of the discipline’s oversight of the continent. After uncovering the implications and costs of this oversight, the paper discusses the insights that emerge from a close consideration of the AfCFTA, including the Pan-African ideology which undergirds the project and insights that contribute to the literature on regionalism. Highlighting the implications of both the AfCFTA and the analysis, the paper additionally discusses the promises and challenges in the future trajectory of the field.

Keywords:

• RIPE history
• disciplinary boundaries
• Africa in IPE
• Post-Colonial theory
• Eurocentrism

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fikir Haile

Fikir Haile is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University. Her fields of study are International Relations and Political Theory, and her research interests lie at the intersection of International Political Economy, African Political Economy, and socio-environmental transformations. Fikir’s Doctoral research examines the governance challenges associated with rapid urban expansion in Sub-Saharan Africa while her broader research agenda focuses on the multi-scalar governance of material and socio-environmental transformations in the continent.