Join us for the first annual Robert I. Rotberg and Fiona J. Y. Rotberg Lecture in African Politics presented by Professor Catherine Boone, Wednesday, April 22 at 4:30 p.m.
This talk explores how the geopolitical and geoeconomic ruptures of the present are impacting domestic politics and interstate relations on the African continent. Changing geoeconomics and intensifying great power rivalries are shifting power balances across subnational regions within African countries, altering the geographic distribution of power within countries. The rise of new forms of geopolitical opportunism can work to reconfigure the boundaries of states themselves, or to disrupt existing regional groupings to give rise to new ones. These changes are driving innovation in the way scholars study politics and international relations in Africa and beyond.
Catherine Boone is Harold Laski Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research focuses on questions of comparative political economy, focusing on institutions and the economic and political geography of state-building in African countries. She is author of Inequality and Political Cleavage in Africa: Regionalism by Design (2024), Property and Political Order: Land Rights and the Structure of Conflict in Africa (2014); Political Topographies of the African State: Territorial Authority and Institutional Choice (2003), and Merchant Capital and the Roots of State Power in Senegal (1993). She was elected to the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.
Open to all members of the Oberlin campus community
