The author engages in a critical and ambitious re-reading – or rather a “deconstruction” in the sense of Derrida and Elias – of the main discourses and narratives devoted to ethnic conflicts in Africa since the 1960s. He challenges both the concepts and the logic that he considers too anchored in the Western epistemology inherited from the colonization of African countries by European countries. He shows the complexity and diversity of the crises and wars that have opposed the countries, regions, and ethnic groups of Africa. He places them in their historical, social, and geopolitical contexts. He reveals some unknown distant origins. Economically, it reveals the importance of the struggles between governments (rarely democratic) but especially between local elites for the appropriation of rents from the exploitation of natural resources. He attributes responsibility for certain crises to Western (less and less European) and Asian (more and more Chinese) multinational groups.
The main originality of the work lies in the scientific approach of the author, who strives to free himself from Western methodological protocols, based in particular on the principles and paradigms laid down by Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. He argues that these are not universal and timeless, but that they are specific to each civilization. It is therefore necessary to integrate regional particularities and post-colonial contingencies in the scientific approaches applied to African economic and social facts. He proposes to deconstruct their representations by multidisciplinary methodologies dominated by anthropology and combining philosophical, sociological, and economic approaches.
Amadou Sarr Diop was particularly influenced by the work of sociologist Georges Balandier, a French university professor, who was director of several African studies centers and the author of the book Ambiguous Africa (1957). Georges Balandier is the initiator of the concept of “detour” by which it is necessary to “decolonize knowledge”.
Amadou Sarr Diop, associate professor at the Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar, is director of the laboratory of the Interdisciplinary Research Group on Education and Knowledge attached to the ET.HO.S Doctoral School (Studies on Man and Society). He has published several books on the theme of Africa’s development.
Jean-Jacques PLUCHART