Katharina P. Coleman, Markus Kornprobst, and Annette Seegers (eds.) 2020. Diplomacy and Borderlands: African Agency at the Intersections of Orders. London: Routledge, xv + 273 pp. ISBN 978-0-367-27332-3 (hbk), £120.00; ISBN 978-1-032-08694-1 (pbk), £36.99; ISBN 978-0-429-29614-7 (ebk), £27.74.
Aiming to complement, reorient, and diversify research on ‘Africa’s internal and external international relations’ (p. 1), the collective volume Diplomacy and Borderlands: African Agency at the Intersections of Orders – edited by Katharina P. Coleman, Markus Kornprobst, and Annette Seegers1 – sets out to engage in an effort that is not only very laudable but also indeed essential, focusing on a variety of African actors and their agency in reading, interpreting, and shaping orders at different scales between the local and the global. To that end, Coleman, Kornprobst, and Seegers propose three concepts as analytical lenses. In addition to the more obvious ‘orders’ (in the plural, including functional and geographic ones), these concepts are ‘borderlands’ – mostly to highlight intersections of different orders – and ‘diplomacy’, or rather ‘diplomats’ – to focus on different actors, including both traditional ones, such as states and international organisations, and non-traditional ones, ‘players’ that are internationally recognised on ‘diplomatic stages’ without representing state governments or intergovernmental bodies (p. 1).
These conceptual lenses tie together a selection of 11 chapters, in addition to the volume’s introduction and a conclusion by the editors, written by a group of seasoned scholars and some junior scholars, based across Europe, Canada, and Africa.2 Many chapters concentrate on contested norms and
This breadth of topics and actors – all of which, in one way or another, work at the intersections of multiple orders and draw on them, often selectively, to pursue their objectives – is clearly a strength of the volume, which successfully broadens and nuances the understanding of African agency as an active and often constitutive element of global orders. However, while the presented chapters are very interesting with lots of fascinating empirical examples and materials, most of them only work with the volume’s key concepts very loosely, not really making full use of their potential. Some authors have tried to reframe their previous research in these terms, which appears to result either in almost everything (e.g. norms, fields, and regions) automatically becoming an ‘order’ or a ‘borderland’ or in every actor becoming a ‘diplomat’. While the need to keep these terms open to some extent is clear, in order to capture what has previously been overlooked, it also risks rendering these concepts rather pale and unspecific (being metaphors only), which is even more regrettable considering the rich existing academic literatures on diplomacy and borderlands. In some cases, other terms and concepts might have been more apt to identify and make sense of the phenomenon or dynamic at hand.
As a consequence of such rather loose or missing engagement with the volume’s key concepts, several aspects remain underexplored. First, in many chapters, it appears that actors simply find themselves and act at the intersection of different orders. As a result, efforts to actively create these intersections (or disconnect orders) are not investigated. Second, and closely related, imagination as a central element of orders appears to be overlooked entirely in the volume. Orders are also essentially always imagined orders that actors try to establish, with varying success, and always only become stable temporarily. Accordingly, what can be observed, more often than not, is the ordering rather than the orders as such. Third, with the exception of chapters 4 and 8, the
As a matter of fact, non-traditional diplomats also in this volume remain outnumbered by more traditional ones, as the editors readily admit in their conclusion. Nevertheless, and this is a point also made by Coleman, Kornprobst, and Seegers in their conclusion, the volume needs to be understood ‘more as a beginning than an end’ in the discussion and further research on Africa’s global international relations (pp. 264f.). Whereas this discussion may also draw on other conceptual lenses to be explored in the future,3 as the editors rightly observe, Diplomacy and Borderlands provides a solid, rich, and very promising starting point.
Katharina P. Coleman is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. Markus Kornprobst holds the Chair of Political Science and International Relations at the Vienna School of International Studies. Annette Seegers is Professor Emeritus at the University of Cape Town, and, in addition to several prestigious visiting fellowships, served as visiting professor at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University for almost two decades.
Of the four scholars currently based in Africa, three are based in South Africa, and one in Nigeria and South Africa.
A similar point and several alternative suggestions for conceptual lenses are offered in the volume edited by Katharina P.W. Döring, Ulf Engel, Linnéa Gelot and Jens Herpolsheimer 2021. Researching the Inner Life of the African Peace and Security Architecture: APSA Inside-Out. Leiden, Boston: Brill.