Series:
Your Blues Ain?t My Blues: The Constitution of International Security and
Insecurity at the Edge of an African Landscape
Professor Siba Grovogui
Thursday 05 November 2009 2:30-4:30pm
YRT Conference Centre
Room 519, 5th Floor
York Research Tower (YRT)
York University
In this presentation, Professor Grovogui will present an examination of
the new Tuareg rebellions in Mali and Niger in the context of the US
Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism initiative. Professor Grovogui will also
address two seldom explored conditions of civil strife and insecurity in
postcolonial Africa. The first is of a political order. It is the
adoption by African states of globalized notions of order and security
that undermine regional and national systems that had previously sustained
life and secured the well-being of populations. The second condition of
insecurity, resulting from the first, is constitutional. It is the
failure of postcolonial states to align the constitutional order on the
exigencies of social life, specifically the securitization of domestic
systems of production, distribution, solidarity, justice.
Professor Grovogui is Professor of International Relations and Political
Theory at the Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University,
where he has been a faculty member since 1995. A specialist in
international relations theory and political theory, Professor Grovogui
has written frequently about African sovereignty, including Sovereigns,
Quasi-Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in
International Law (1996) and "Regimes of Sovereignty: Rethinking
International Morality and the African Condition". Professor Grovogui
previously taught at Eastern Michigan University and holds a PhD from the
University of Wisconsin at Madison and a law degree from the Institut
Polytechnique, Gamal Abdel Nasser in Guinea.
