Building expertise on Africa at Eurac Research

In October 2020, Guinea - one of the poorest African nations - held a violently contested presidential election and due to its ethnic area interconnections was branded a "powder keg for the whole of West Africa". Building upon essays by Linda Ghirardello and Roland Benedikter for the renowned journals Global Policy, Micro Mega, Harvard International Review as well as an interview by Linda with Abdulaye Sadio Barry, a Germany-based exiled Guinean leader of the new-generation opposition party Block for Alternation in Guinea (BAG) and relying on multiple previous works of Roland in cooperation with young Togolese scholar William Mensa Tsedze and Ismaila Ouedraogo on Burkina Faso, Togo and the new Pan-Africanism, the Center for Advanced Studies regards it as a start to a long-term and ongoing engagement with and for Africa.

The goal is to provide insights and measures to support the constant development towards sustainable area engagement for the benefit (and with the involvement) of local, regional, and supra-regional policy makers and institutions. The Center’s work on Africa also includes a PhD co-supervision of Roland at the Université de Bordeaux, France, in cooperation with Nazi Boni University Burkina Faso (double degree program), one of three Burkina Faso public universities, on the use of new technologies to improve rural Africans lives. Together with the existing long-standing expertise in the different fields of Eurac Research’s other specialised social science institutes, the Center for Advanced Studies aims at establishing a cooperation-oriented Africa framework for the region.