Gino Vlavonou’s research while affiliated with Social Science Research Council and other places

What happens when researchers based in the Global North are suddenly unable to access research sites, especially those in the Global South? In 2020, COVID-related public health measures and travel restrictions made clear how dependent certain categories of researchers in the North are on easy access to research sites in the South. The space opened up by their pandemic-imposed retreat and the solutions devised in response have provoked both challenges and opportunities. In this article, we reflect on this space, focusing on how forms of more just collaboration become possible when the inertia of Global North-controlled research is interrupted. Many scholars have argued for change in how Global North-South scholarly collaborations proceed, seeking to root out colonial practices and attend to power imbalances that disadvantage South-based scholars. COVID's disruptions offer a chance to reorient these collaborations toward more ethical forms of research. We examine the ethical and practical questions inherent in such collaborations and explore two case studies of attempts to reorient collaborative work, drawing primarily on examples of collaboration between African, European, and North American scholars. Cognizant that these efforts are only initial attempts toward reworking collaborative practice, we also trace the challenges they bring, from the duty of care and paternalistic approaches to funding and practical problems. We suggest that a careful consideration of these issues can help to establish more just ways to fully reengage North-South research and collaboration in the wake of the global pandemic.

Since at least the colonial era, the Central African Republic (CAR) has been a hotbed of rural rebellion and protest. This article explores the political discourses of members of the Anti-Balaka, a diffuse protest movement and armed rebellion, comparing discourses to see how they vary in relation to demographic categories: urban and rural, elites and peasants. Lombard and Vlavonou find that rural peasants demand a moral economy of interpersonal respect, while elite (usually urban) adherents claim inclusion in a system of official recognition and patronage. Both are concerned with respect, but what is radical about the vision of the peasants is that they can enact it on their own.

This article takes a reflexive look at the dilemmas and challenges of accessing a predominantly male circle of political and nongovernmental elites in the Central African Republic from the perspective of a young Black African male student researcher. It focuses on questions of positionality, arguing that certain African social norms regarding seniority and hierarchy can affect data generation, specifically access and interactions within interviews. The article argues that the author's identities as a student and researcher complicated access to male and senior elite interviewees during field research, thus illustrating anew how diasporic Africans might experience the field research exercise differently even if accessing elites is generally a difficult exercise. This article contributes to understanding power differentials among interviewers, including differences among students and researchers, and the influence of race during fieldwork by African scholars. This is within an emerging literature on fieldwork that focuses on graduate students in International Relations and Comparative Politics.

This article examines how existing in a larger socio-political environment of contested national belonging shapes Muslims’ experiences in the Central African Republic (car). We draw on data gathered between 2017 and 2019 from various archival sources and in-depth interviews with Muslim religious leaders and non-Muslims in car’s capital, Bangui. We argue that through claims to autochthony a dual logic of exclusion co-occurs which shapes how Muslims experience their minority status. First, national level autochthony debates frame Muslim minority exclusion from the Central African national imagination. Second, at the Muslim intra-communal level, and particularly among religious leaders, autochthony encapsulates debates over “authentic” Muslimhood – fuelled not by contestation over Islamic practice and interpretation, but rather historical contestation based on ethnic exclusion. Specifically, we show that claims to “proper” Central African Muslimhood are premised on autochthony embedded in a dominant myth of primary settlement advanced by certain Muslim leaders.

Through two crossed auto-ethnographic works, this paper explores the ‘reflexive tension’ coming with the African identities in diasporic contexts and in Western academic training. As the authors have been socialized in their junior scholar careers in the literature of international relations, they revisit the aforementioned literature in light of the decolonizing literature about IR curriculum and the postcolonial literature. This article argues that it is possible to resist multiple conflicting worldviews, sometimes accept components of them, leaving some questions partly unanswered and living in the permanent tensions and interrogations of our positionality to remain open to alternative paths. To illustrate their emancipatory journeys, the authors present how their nuanced voices were completely silenced, or even inaudible, in the narratives framed by the West and their respective African communities when international events, like Charlie Hebdo shooting or the Rhodes Must Fall protest movement in 2015 affected them. This paper is an invitation to explore deeper the richness of African identities with a renewed auto-ethnographic engagement through ‘reflexive tension’ to regain agency and emancipation from the denial coming with binary narratives.

Regional and subregional organizations have assumed a larger role in maintaining peace and security, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. The African Peace and Security Architecture of the African Union (APSA) increasingly participates militarily in various peacekeeping operations. Policy-focused analyses of the APSA not only characterize it as an international regime but also assume the benefits of this regime. However, this depiction of the APSA as a regime obscures the military dimension of its approach to peace and security throughout the continent. This article argues that a regime analysis romanticizes the APSA, and the type of security that it practices requires more attention. Using a field-inspired approach, this article suggests that the security practiced by the APSA is a result of various internal struggles within different institutions of the APSA and its external relations over the meaning-making of peace and security.