Director’s Breakfast-Book Launch: ICAR Host’s Dr. Adekeye Adebajo
On October 29, 2010, ICAR hosted Dr. Abekeye Adebajo, Executive Director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution, South Africa. The event, coordinated through the Office of the Director, gave Dr. Adebajo an opportunity to present his recently published book "The Curse of Berlin: Africa After the Cold War" and created an informal and collegial atmosphere for staff and students to interact with one of Africa's leading conflict resolution scholar-practitioners. ICAR Director Andrea Bartoli hopes that this event will be just the first step towards a stronger engagement with Africa's conflict resolution community.
Dr. Adebajo's academic career began in East Germany, where he witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall. Following this, he took up residence as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, later going on to act as United Nations observer to the historic 1994 elections in South Africa. Dr. Adebajo then spent two years at Tuft's Fletcher School and a year at the Brooking's institute. Since then, his professional career has taken him from "the Cape to Cairo" in a constant fusion of African and global international relations. Dr. Adebajo humorously compared his relationship with the historic events of modern African international relations to the life of Forrest Gump. Jokes aside, it cannot be denied that Dr. Adebajo has played a considerable role as both an academic witness and active participant in the evolution of Africa.
The title of Dr. Adebajo's book is a cryptic reference to two key events that have shaped the identity of the African Continent; the 1885 Berlin Conference that saw Europe's colonial powers divide up the kingdoms of Africa for their personal gain, and the 1990 fall of the Berlin Wall that freed the world from the shackles of Cold War bi-polarization. Dr. Adebajo seeks to explore the future of Africa, prescribing that the continent take advantage of the new multi-polar world to build domestic capacity for resolving conflict.
Central to Dr. Adebajo's understanding of 'Pax Africana' is the quest for "three magical kingdoms"; security, hegemony, and unity. Dr. Adebajo believes that security within Africa cannot be constrained by the simplistic narrative of hermetically sealed sovereign states. Instead, peace and security should be achieved by giving prominence to the role of development in the human security paradigm and confronting the embedded inequalities of the world system. Although a provocative term, Dr. Adebajo believes that Africa is in need of domestic hegemony that will provide leadership, capacity and values in a similar manner to the way that the US assisted Europe's recovery from the Second World War. Underlying these efforts Dr. Adebajo espouses a unifying spirit of Pan-Africanism, that moves the continent beyond the rhetoric of decolonization, focusing on socio-economic decolonization enabled by interstate cooperation and regional structures.
If past is prologue, then Dr. Adebajo suggests that Africa must return to the future and recognize the important role it has already played in shaping the world. Mahatma Gandhi's development of non-violent protest in South Africa in turn inspired Martin Luther King's strategy of direct action. Without the civil rights movement it is hard to imagine that an African-American could possibly have become President of the United States. Dr. Adebajo hopes that through creative engagement with the international system Africa will move from "pawn to player" on the world stage.