In the name of human rights: the problematics of EU ethical foreign policy in Africa and elsewhere
This doctoral research project explores avenues to research ethically defined foreign policy differ ently, i.e. in ways that more systematically account for its counterproductive elements. Building on the specific case of the European Union’s foreign policy in sub-Saharan Africa, embodied by the 2000 Cotonou Agreement and the 2007 Joint Africa-EU Strategy, through four papers and one books review, the study firstly develops the Ethical Intervener Europe analytical framework to account for the embedded problematics in the EU’s ethical foreign policy. Secondly, through an eclectic theoretical approach, the study seeks to theoretically pin-point some alternatives to think about ethical foreign policy and finally, looks to concretize it through its application on the case of rela tive autonomous peace- and state-building in Somaliland. This research report briefly introduces the different findings and addresses the need for further research in view of a decolonial approach to the study of ethical foreign policy in a context of structural inequality.
Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality
Introduction: Criticism after Postcoloniality3Pt. 1Rationalities21Ch. 1Colonial Governmentality23Ch. 2Religion in Colonial Civil Society53Ch. 3The Government of Freedom70Pt. 2Histories91Ch. 4Dehistoricizing History93Ch. 5"An Obscure Miracle of Connection"106Pt. 3Futures129Ch. 6The Aftermaths of Sovereignty131Ch. 7Community, Number and the Ethos of Democracy158Ch. 8Fanonian Futures?190Coda: After Bandung: From the Politics of Colonial Representation to a Theory of Postcolonial Politics221Acknowledgements225Index227
Do Potential People Have Moral Rights?
By a potential person I shall mean an entity which is not now a person but which is capable of developing into a person, given certain biologically and/or technologically possible conditions. This is admittedly a narrower sense than some would attach to the term ‘potential'. After all, people of the twenty-fifth century, if such there will be, are in some sense potential people now, even though the specific biological entities from which they will develop, i.e. the particular gametes or concepti, do not yet exist. For there do exist, in the reproductive capacities of people now living and in the earth's resources, conditions adequate to produce these future people eventually, provided of course that various possible catastrophes are avoided. Indeed, in some sense of ‘potential’ there have been countless billions of potential people from the beginning of time. But I am concerned not with such remote potentialities but with currently existing entities that are capable of developing into people.