African History and Institutions

The course aims to provide students with the interpretative tools necessary to understand
1. The assumptions related to the formation of the colonial state,
2. The process of decolonization and, therefore,
3. The constituent elements of the independent state in Africa and the regional economic communities, established to face internal problems and global challenges. Those who follow the third module can deepen their focus on Southern Africa.
Those who follow the third didactic unit will be able to deepen a specific regional case study

Students should achieve an understanding of the impact caused by the Colonial course, on different African peoples with their own social, cultural and political structures in past environments. They are expected to demonstrate a certain measure of ability to recognize and articulate the diversity of human experience, including ethnicity, race, language and/or gender, articulating them in the tensions between different socio-political and economic models, by producing their own historical analyses. They should be able to range from the colonial exploitation to the bureaucratic patrimonialism of the independent states, to the competition for control, management and redistribution of the natural resources along with the global trends in Africa, and in sub-Saharan Africa in particular, on behalf of the developmental state. Such a capacity to think critically and historically when discussing the cultural conflicts and institutional stratification in the past, and their consequences in the present, has to be expected in students in their third year in a political sciences course degree.