Perspectives on Regionalism in (Southern) Africa
This review essay uses the works of Nana Poku (2001), James Sidaway (2002) and Andrew Grant and Fredrik Soderbaum (2003) as principal texts for the discussion on regionalism in Africa. Together, the works of both authors create an elaborate text on regionalism in the continent and provide the intellectual space for re-assessing regionalisation in (southern) Africa against the backdrop of discourses of regionalism elsewhere. The essay is not intended to offer book reviews. Rather, the aim is to tease out salient points in the texts in order to bring them into a coherent discussion. The intensive re-conceptualisation of regions, place, space and scale has yielded a quite different appreciation of regions and their formation than what the areal differentiation school of thought once offered. The result has been to conceive spatial differentiation in terms of practices and processes rather than some given or preconceived qualities. Accordingly, 'it has become typical to understand regions as historically contingent social processes emerging as a constellation of institutionalised practices, power relations and discourse' (Paasi, 2004, p. 540). In this sense, spatial differentiation cannot be reduced to a single scale (Duncan and Savage, 1989). Agents of regionalism are not necessarily limited to the regional scale, but are part of a constellation of practices and a mix of actors. As Beauregard (1995, p. 239) has correctly noted, 'once we focus our attention on the agents who literally make scale, the partitioning of space into global-national-regional-local seems simplistic . . . In fact, it is the mix of those actors, and the distribution of influence among them, that results in such places becoming regional, national or international nodes in the world-system'. It can be argued that the ramification of power relations, together with changes in the nature and scales at which regions are formed, render the notion of the region unstable. Indeed, calls for new regionalisms have become a familiar feature of the debate
Trade Regionalism, Decolonization-Bordering and the New Partnership for Africa's Development
Theorization of region-border nexus affirms that regions are “contested contingent social constructs” established through bordering processes, whilst simultaneously symbolizing and institutionalizing borders. As a spatial process of bordering, trade regionalism should create and recreate “spaces of regionalism” for determination and dominion of territorial power over trade relations in the interest of decolonization, too. Africa’s vertical trade relations with former colonial powers and increasingly with China have remained excessive under the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), simultaneously as horizontal intra-African trade relations have become statistically meaningless. The Pearson’s product-moment correlations and p-values for 2000 and 2006 inter-Regional Economic Communities (inter-RECs, including the rest of Africa) exports and imports show that NEPAD trade regionalism has failed to decolonize the meaning and function of colonial borders at the RECs spaces and continental scale, as an “act of reproducing territorial power” over which RECs and Africa could exercise dominion of trade relations.
“Social Media Misinformation”—An Epidemic within the COVID-19 Pandemic
"Social Media Misinformation"-An Epidemic within the COVID-19 Pandemic.