Mon | May 5th, 2025 | 16:00 – 17:30 (CEST)
Earnest Struggles for Structural Transformation in West Africa: Governing the Disarticulated Economy Since Independence
Prof. Dr. Kai Koddenbrock (Bard College Berlin)
How have postcolonial West African states grappled with the challenges of their colonial, disarticulated economy over the past six decades? The notion of the ‘disarticulated economy’ was developed by Samir Amin, among others, and means that the postcolonial economy has continued to be geared towards exports to the Global North, neglects the needs of the people and has built limited links between the more outward- and more inward-facing parts of the economy. This talk argues that the story of moving towards a more self-centered economy in Senegal, Ghana, Guinea, and Nigeria can usefully be understood as one of earnest struggle—a process shaped by the complex interplay of committed government action, colonial legacies, and structural constraints imposed by global capitalism. The struggles in focus will be the attempts to move away from colonial cash crops, building agricultural systems that ‘feed the nation’ and financial systems that serve the people.
Drawing on comparative, longue durée research undertaken with my colleagues in the DFG project on financial policy space and my research group at the University of Bayreuth, the talk analyzes three distinct phases of struggle. First, the immediate post-independence period marked by efforts to transition from colonial cash-crop economies. Second, the era of debt crises and Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) during the 1980s and 1990s, which imposed neoliberal reforms and deepened financial subordination. Third, the post-SAP period of international debt relief and renewed efforts to achieve economic diversification, feed the nation and build a financial system that serves the people.
Our research critiques existing literature that overemphasizes governance failures or resource-curse paradigms, arguing instead for a structural analysis of global financial and trade hierarchies that perpetuate economic dependency in postcolonial states without losing sight of government action. To move beyond cycles of dependency, bold strategies of delinking coupled with regional industrial policy, and enhanced regional trade cooperation must be pursued. These findings contribute to broader debates on postcolonial sovereignty and the possibility of self-reliance in the Global South.
Kai Koddenbrock is a professor of political economy at Bard College Berlin. He is working on economic sovereignty and self-determination in the Global South and particularly on the role of the international monetary system and global and domestic financial markets in helping and constraining this quest. Located at the intersections of international relations and international political economy, he also works on geopolitics and geoeconomics and the new scramble for rare earths.
He co-founded with Ndongo Sylla and Maha ben Gadha the African Monetary and Economic Sovereignty conferences, which have been held in Tunis and Dakar in 2019 and 2022. He has led the Politics of Money Network with Benjamin Braun, funded by the German Research Council, and heads a research group at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth.
Kai has held academic positions at several German universities, worked for the United Nations in NYC, the World Food Programme in Rome and the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin. He has been a fellow at Columbia University, the Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Societies, Sciences Po, University of Sussex, as well as the Institute for Advanced Studies and the École des Hautes Études Internationales in Paris. He has contributed essays to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and to Jacobin and Soziopolis among others. His most recent academic articles are: “Earnest Struggles: Structural Transformation, government finance and the recurrence of debt crisis in Senegal,”Beyond financialisation: the longue durée of finance and production in the Global South” and “International financial subordination: a critical research agenda.” He has recently edited Capital Claims: Power and Global Finance (Routledge), with Benjamin Braun, and African Monetary and Economic Sovereignty in the 21st Century (Pluto Press), with Maha ben Gadha, Ndongo Samba Sylla, Fadhel Kaboub and Ines Mahmood. His latest monograph was The practice of humanitarian intervention: Aid workers, agencies and institutions in the DR Congo (Routledge, 2015).
Venue:
Geozentrum, Ü8
University of Bonn,
Meckenheimer-Allee 176,
53115 Bonn
