Alex De Waal in The Conversation:
African scholarship on Africa is operating at only a fraction of its true potential. It is hampered by the preferences, policies and politics of the Western academy. There are three reasons for my assertion.
The first relates to the poor state of knowledge about African economics and politics. Western academics tend not to focus on generating accurate information, instead using datasets to infer causal associations on a highly abstract level. But these datasets are actually far too weak for any such conclusions to be drawn.
Secondly, the structure of academic rewards and careers systematically disadvantages those who do not have the skills or capacities for this kind of high-end quantitative endeavour or have serious misgivings about it. This causes severe dissonance between actual lived experience and the academic work that is validated by universities.
Finally, there’s what I call “Occidentalism” in theory and policy. This ascribes a cogency to the West’s intellectual and cultural products that doesn’t exist. Quite simply, the Western experience of state formation remains the standard against which the rest of the world is indexed...[more]