Announcement / Call for Papers

Fluid Networks and Hegemonic Powers in the Western Indian Ocean

2nd International Thematic Conference on Africa and the Indian Ocean

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The AEGIS Collaborative Research Group on Africa in the Indian Ocean welcomes applications to participate in the forthcoming Thematic Conference.

Please, send an email with your name, proposed title and short abstract to

aioconference2015@gmail.com

Deadline for submission of abstracts – 31 January 2015

Notification of accepted paper proposals – 15 February 2015

Organizers:

Ian Walker, Oxford University

Manuel João Ramos, ISCTE-University Institute of Lisbon

Preben Kaarsholm, Roskilde University

 

Date and place:

This 2nd Thematic Conference of the CRG-AIO will take place at ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon, in 9th-10th April 2014. It proposes to bring together the CRG members and non-CRG researchers working on Africa in the Indian Ocean and who are interested in bridging disciplinary and regional borders in this field of study.

The 2-day Conference will be divided in four panels (on history, anthropology, international relations and security/conflict studies), on the general theme of understanding the complex interactions between Fluid Networks and Hegemonic Powers in the Western Indian Ocean.

 

Description and outcomes:

As with the 2013 1st International Conference on Africa and the Indian Ocean, we intend to publish the results in a Conference book. The Conference will be an important preparation for the already selected CGR-AIO panel at the coming ECAS 6 – Paris, in July 2015. It will also be an important opportunity to strengthen the existing ties between CRG members, and bring not only East African but also Turkish, Arab and Indian researchers and research centres into closer partnership with AEGIS.

 

Thematic outline:

Fluid Networks and Hegemonic Powers in the Western Indian Ocean 2nd International Thematic Conference on Africa and the Indian Ocean ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon, 9-10 April 2015

The Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea, with its extensive trade and circulation networks, has been characterized as one of the major “inter-regional arenas” within broader studies of processes of globalisation. These seafaring networks are some of the oldest in the world, and through the centuries persistent and resilient forms of transnational and transcultural communication have developed in the regions touched by it, interlinking the Horn of Africa, the African Indian Ocean islands and Eastern and Southern Africa to the Arabian peninsula, the western parts of the Indian subcontinent and even meaningful parts of the Southern and Eastern Asian regions. It is also a particularly sensitive area in security terms, presently harbouring major naval and aerial surveillance capabilities of both intra- and extra-regional military and economic powers.

The western Indian Ocean has thus been both a fluid space of intense exchanges between various local communities and a much-coveted setting for successive projects of hegemonic appropriations of human and material resources. The substantial flow of goods and people across it has, from time immemorial, attracted predatory and clandestine activities, which are today the pretext for maintaining an impressive security presence by member countries of NATO and for a display of military-naval affirmation of emerging powers such as India and China.

A comprehensive understanding of the conditions and implications of this multiple presence requires a multidisciplinary effort that has to take into account the underlying, and generally silent, reality of the existence of family-based networks (African, Arab, Indian, Armenian, Iranian and South-east Asian) who, assuming an ancient heritage, have ensured the continuation of flows between the different countries connected by the Western Indian Ocean by resiliently adapting themselves to ever-changing balances of power, to the impositions of external interveners and to the bargaining vectors of local and regional predators.

The present Conference sets forth to analyse the deep-rooted immersion of the populations of the eastern coasts of Africa in the vast network of commercial, cultural and religious interactions that extend to the Middle-East and the Indian subcontinent, as well as the long-time involvement of various exogenous military, administrative and economic powers (Ottoman, Omani, Portuguese, Dutch, British, French and, more recently, European-Americans).

On the side-lines of an inward-looking vision of Africa shared by most African Union countries, which have only recently begun to develop a fledgling security policy and a strategy of development of the African coastline, various agents from East African countries have sought to manage and develop existing networks in a transnational logic supported by historical ties that come from the old triangular trade facilitated by the monsoon regime, linking these coastal regions to the Arabian Peninsula and South-east Asia.