The politics of survival : towards a global, long-term and reflexive interpretation of the African contemporary experience

This paper proposes a conceptual framework for the systematic linking of theory and empiricism in a transnational perspective accommodating the local, the national and the international simultaneously. The argument expands the narrow State-centred approach of Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz in 'Africa works: disorder as political instrument' (1999), replacing a linear understanding of the global historical trajectory with a nonlinear understanding, and distinguishing between the nature of industrial and reflexive modernity (or First and Second Modernity), and between active and passive trust. The African continent entered the Second Modernity with the beginning of the slave trade; the West did so in the 1960s. Conceptualizations of the individual, the relation of the individual to society, and the nature of power relations are remarkably similar in the Second Modernity and Pre-Modern societies. The concept 'triple chevauchement' permits analysis of the overlapping logics and realities of the "three (coexisting) modernities". Contrary to Chabal and Daloz, whose suggestion that the African postcolonial cultural order constitutes a distinct universe legitimates noncommunication between Africa and the West, the present author's global, long-term historical and reflexive interpretation highlights the similarities between Africa and the West and underlines the need for dialogue. Effective communication will enable a coming to terms with the long common history of domination and opportunistic defence, and may be the ultimate condition for Africa's inclusion in the emerging global economy of knowledge

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