CBEES Advanced Seminar with Katharina Döring.

Presenter: Katharina Döring, postdoctoral researcher at CBEES
Chair: Mark Bassin, Professor at CBEES

Abstract:

The Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, where the African Union Commission is located, has been referred to as the “Brussels of Africa”. A capital that is inherently linked to a continentalist project. When in 1963 the leaders of independent African countries met to establish the first continental organization in Africa, Habib Bourguiba, Tunisia’s first president, described the city as “that heroic bastion of African liberty”, clearly invoking the fact that the capital of the Ethiopian empire under Haile Selassie successfully resisted any attempts at colonialization.

The paper explores such spatial semantics that link the continentalism that underpins the African Union to the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa. By harnessing insights from critical geography, the paper seeks to explore the role that concrete places play in the production of continentalisms.

Historical sources, such as speeches by African leaders from 1963 as well as contemporary narratives, collected during research stays at the African Union Commission since 2013, form the empirical basis of the paper.

Bio

Dr. Katharina P.W. Döring is researcher at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES), Södertörn University Stockholm. She works on competing geopolitical projects in the military and security sector in Africa. She is part of the research group "Continentalism, Geopolitics, and the idea of 'big-space' political formations in comparative historical perspective" that brings together studies from Africa, Eurasia, Europe and Latin America. She received her PhD from Leipzig University. Currently, she is authoring a book on African military politics in the Sahel.