African Activist Archive

This Issue Working Group (IWG) will assess how scholars and their academic analyses should link to and affect U.S. policy on Africa in the late 1990s. This involves analyzing the possibilities for scholars to affect U.S. policy on Africa in the arenas where it is formed - in the academy itself, the media, the policy-interested NGOs and public interest lobbies for Africa in Washington, the Congress, the Administration (State Department, National Security Council, White House), and the many other agencies of the U.S. government where Africa-policy are made (the World Bank, IMF, DOD, CIA, Department of Commerce, etc.). A goal will be to produce a strategy document of analysis of these potential arenas of action, the current role of scholars in each, and potential areas of need and opportunity for scholarly focus. There are at least five action options, which are not mutually exclusive: 1) mobilize to affect U.S. Africa policy in the Administration and Congress through classical interest-group tactics with other constituencies for Africa, 2) assist and help direct the NGOs which are oriented to Africa policy, 3) conduct research and publish on the key pressing issues in Africa and concerning Africa in the global economy, 4) engage policy-makers and their institutions and representatives in debate on the key issues, and 5) organize nationally and locally among other scholars, students, and the local community to seek to develop a constituency for Africa. In spite of the wide range of alternative channels for action, scholarly mobilization is currently weak. Scholars, like many North Americans, are beset by the ambiguities of changes in U.S. government policy toward Africa, by the shifting context in the global paradigms of power, by the racial cleavages which continue to bedevil a broader mobilization for Africa in the U.S., by the demobilizing dynamics of the economic and health crises in Africa, and by the end of the familiar forms of anti-apartheid work in which many scholars were engaged. This IWG can seek to provide a compelling rationale and methodology for mobilizing U.S. scholars on Africa to work on policy issues, to set some priorities among policy issues concerning Africa, and to derive some strategic plans for U.S. Africanist scholars and for ACAS for the next year or two.

African Activist Archive

ACAS Issue Working Group: Scholar Activists: From the 1980s to the 1990s

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