Repräsentationen von Staat in Afrika

In academic as well as political and media discourse, fragile and failed states are described today as safe havens for transnational terrorists and thus as a global security threat. The vast majority of the states labelled as such are located on the African continent. Within these discourses, statehood in general is often denied to African states, or the internal state actors are represented as solely corrupt and criminal. In this book, Anna Krämer presents a critical genealogical reconstruction of hegemonic representations of statehood in the Euro-Western discourse on Africa. By juxtaposing contemporary political science discourse on statehood in Africa to the field of historical (colonial) representations of African states from the 18th and 19th centuries, she reveals continuous power relations and submits them to a critical interrogation. Thereby, her book contributes to a postcolonial conceptualisation of statehood on the African continent.