Introduction
Africa has vibrant International Relations (IR) epistemic communities.Footnote 1 Major anglophone, Arabic, and francophone universities in Africa have two IR programmes, one within departments of political science, and standalone centres dedicated to graduate education and professional training in international affairs. The origins of these IR communities, their contributions to international relations knowledge, and implications of African-based international politics scholarship for the rest of the IR field, are rarely explored. To address this gap, the article discusses how and why the IR community in Ghana emerged and its implications for the broader field of IR.Footnote 2 The article shows that the Ghanaian IR community came out of the early 1960s research, teaching, and academic programming designed at the University of Ghana, Legon (hereafter Legon) for AfricansFootnote 3 to decolonise knowledge and to shift the focus of international politics scholarship from ‘the study of Eurocentric political subjects to Ghanaian and African subjects’.Footnote 4
The IR intellectual hub at Legon (hereafter the Legon School of International Relations or LSIR) is decolonial in theoretical perspective, grounded in southern epistemologies, relational in ontology, qualitative in methodology, practice-based, Global South in orientation, and it seeks to promote equitable distribution of power, as well as privilege, in the international system. Although the LSIR scholarship as a package is distinctive, some of its ideas overlap with the work of several contemporary IR movements in the West, including that of the African IR (AIR),Footnote 5 Global IR (GIR),Footnote 6 and Postcolonial/decolonial IR (PIR).Footnote 7 Similar to the scholarship of AIR, GIR, and PIR, the LSIR scholars advocate for and use diverse experiences as the foundation of IR theorising. Like the AIR, the GIR, and the PIR movements, the LSIR scholars centre marginalised voices, critique great power politics, and ensure that IR teaching, research, and academic programming are not mere imitation of problem-solving IR.Footnote 8
The story of the LSIR has enormous implications for the broader IR field. Besides bringing foresight issues and ideas such as decoloniality, inclusivity, diversity, and southern epistemologies to the discipline long before they became mainstream IRFootnote 9 ideas, the LSIR offers an interesting equity-oriented answer to the central question of who is IR scholarship for, and what greater purpose does it serve in society? LSIR scholars turn Kenneth Waltz's view that ‘it would be ridiculous to construct a theory on international politics based on Malaysia and Costa Rica’Footnote 10 on its head by arguing that the focus of IR scholarship should be on the less powerful actors in the international system. From the LSIR perspective, IR scholars should neither theorise for theorising sake nor theorise just for great powers. Rather, IR scholars should theorise with a view to creating a more equitable global order. Thus, in many ways, the LSIR story provides interesting lessons for mainstream IR communities.
The rest of the article is organised into five sections. The section following the introduction provides a succinct historical background of the LSIR. This is followed by an outline of the pillars of the LSIR in terms of epistemology, ontology, methodology, theoretical approaches to International Relations, and its normative claims. The next section explores the factors that led to the decaying pillars of the Legon School in the 1980s. The penultimate section examines the rebuilding of the LSIR through the creation of the Legon Centre for International Affairs (LECIA) in 1989, renamed the Legon Centre for International Affairs and Diplomacy (LECIAD) in 2010. It shows the similarities and differences between the international politics scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s and the teaching, research, curriculum programming, and publications of LECIAD. Finally, the conclusion provides a summary and its implications for the broader IR community.
Historical context
The LSIR emerged in the 1950s and early 1960s as part of a broader effort to decolonise higher education and knowledge production in Ghana.Footnote 11 As part of the decolonisation process, the post-independent government of Ghana, led by the Pan-African and anti-colonial scholar and politician Kwame Nkrumah, initiated a series of reforms to address the ills of university education in Ghana. According to Agbodeka, there were primarily five major limitations of university education in Ghana prior to the reforms. First, university education was widely seen as too elitist. It was designed for few people (mostly men) and for those who will support the colonial administration. Second, university education was perceived as the main vehicle for the production and reproduction of colonial mentality in Ghana. Third, the only university in Ghana at the time, called the University College of the Gold Coast (UCGC), was widely perceived as a hotbed of conservatism and neocolonialism. Fourth, the teaching, research, and policy direction of the UCGC were seen to be dictated in London and by the 80 per cent non-African faculty members. Finally, the knowledge produced at the UCGC was considered too abstract, fluffy, theorising for theory's sake, and was disconnected from the developmental needs of Ghana, the African continent, and the Global South. To address the five problems of university education in Ghana, the reforms tried to dismantle the foothold that the University of London, the University of OxfordFootnote 12 and the University of CambridgeFootnote 13 (hereafter Loxbridge) had established over university education in Ghana during the colonial periodFootnote 14 by turning the UCGC, which was an affiliate college of the University of London, into the University of Ghana, Legon in 1961.
The move to decolonise knowledge production in Ghana led to the creation of the Department of Political Science (DPS) as an independent disciplinary unit out of the politics, philosophy, and economics (PPE) programme of the UCGC in 1962.Footnote 15 The study of international politics (IP), as it was then called, emerged as a major subfield of the DPS, becoming one of the public faces of the new decolonial approach to scholarship in Ghana.Footnote 16 Anti-colonial scholars such as Jitendra Mohan, whose ‘life was characterised by his unwavering commitment, both intellectual and political, to the struggles of the peoples of the Third World against colonialism’, ensured that the teaching and research of IP at Legon reflected the perspective of the Global South rather than that of Loxbridge.Footnote 17 Further, Pan-Africanists like Yaw Manu and Emmanuel Hassen, whose ‘book on the social and political thought of Frantz Fanon was influential within radical circles in Ghanaian universities’ centred African and decolonial issues in academic programming and research at DPS.Footnote 18
Several factors, including a backlash from the Loxbridge scholars, the rise of comparative politics in the DPS, as well as Ghanaian politics, interrupted the influence of the LSIR in the late 1960s. However, the return to Legon from abroad (primarily from Canada and the United States of America) of a new cadre of anti-colonial scholars in the early 1970sFootnote 19 strengthened the position of LSIR until the chilling impacts on scholarship in Ghana of the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) military regime led by Jerry Rawlings in the 1980s. The Rawlings factor, as Kevin Shillington put it, was a double-edged sword for the LSIR.Footnote 20 The neoliberal policies of the Rawlings government and the poaching of key critical scholars from Legon by the PNDC regime undermined IP scholarship.Footnote 21 Yet, it was the critical voices within the PNDC that made Legon create the LECIAD at the request of Ghana's Ministry of Foreign Affairs to resurrect the best tradition of the LSIR.Footnote 22 The next section explores the main ideational building blocks of the LSIR.
Pillars of the Legon School
Pillars of the LSIR include, but are not limited to, decolonial theoretical perspectives, relational ontology, southern epistemologies, a focus on current affairs, preference for qualitative research, centring of Global South agency in scholarship, and demand for equitable distribution of global power. These ideas and concerns, which go beyond ‘demand for more diversity and better representation of hitherto marginalised voices and experience’, to question ‘the deep-seated power relations that have shaped IR's ontological, epistemological, and methodological foundations’, are at the heart of the AIR, the GIR, and the PIR scholarship.Footnote 23
Decolonial IR
LSIR scholars sought to shift IR teaching, research, and academic programing from Eurocentrism while simultaneously advocating for a just global order.Footnote 24 Jitendra Mohan, who taught the first introduction to IR course in the DPS, led the way by exposing students to various ways that international relations can be understood and explained from the decolonial perspective, as well as showing them how the international order at the time worked against interests of people in the Global South. As ‘[h]ostile as he was to the machinations of the US, [ … and] even more hostile to what he saw as Soviet pressure on Third World governments’, Mohan's teaching critiqued the activities of the Soviet Union and the US as much as he bashed the negative imprints of colonialism in newly independent states.Footnote 25 Like the writings of AIR, GIR and PIR scholars, Mohan's publications were equally critical of the global powers and interestingly challenged European interpretation of the world.Footnote 26
Similar to DIR and PIR entry-level courses, Mohan used the introductory class to set the stage for decolonising political science knowledge in reading materials students were assigned and for the teaching of topics, such as the search for a new international order, South-South cooperation, the non-aligned movement, Western imperialism, and superpower machination of the Global South.Footnote 27 Yaw Manu, who taught the upper-level IR courses at the undergraduate level, grounded students in Pan-Africanism, regionalism (what Amitav Acharya calls regional worlds), and structuralist perspectives to international politics.Footnote 28 Influenced by Pan-African scholarship and the works of structuralists, Manu and colleagues directed the attention of students to the unequal international political and economic relations as well as the contribution of neocolonialism to the underdevelopment of the African continent.Footnote 29 Although scholars of the LSIR are united by their dedication to decolonial scholarship, they self-identify their theoretical perspectives differently.Footnote 30 Some self-identify their perspectives as Pan-African/Nkrumah/neo-colonial/non-conformist perspectives,Footnote 31 while others see themselves as gender theorists,Footnote 32 subaltern realist thinkers,Footnote 33 and African socialists.Footnote 34 Of course, there are those whose works cut across the various theoretical positions or do not write from one analytical position.Footnote 35
Regional and relational ontology
Scholars of the LSIR look at the world through the prism of regions defined as ‘social constructions that make references to territorial location and geographical or normative contiguity’.Footnote 36 First, the teaching and research programme of the LSIR reflects in many ways the call made by Amitav Acharya in his ASA Presidential Address in 2014.Footnote 37 As a unit of analysis, LSIR scholars centre the continent of Africa as much as they provincialise the region of the West.Footnote 38 They do not see any part of the world, including the West, as the centre of the universe or elevate one region over the other. Although the LSIR scholars recognise Anglo-American power and influence on the world, they do not treat European experiences as universal, as some mainstream Anglo-American IR scholars tend to do.
Second, some of the scholars of the LSIR follow the structuralist tradition of economic development of postcolonial societies pioneered by Raúl Prebisch, Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank, Gunnar Myrdal, and Arthur Lewis, who see the world in material terms.Footnote 39 As a result, several LSIR scholars emphase the role of material forces and influences on Global Southern states. The emphasis on material properties leads some scholars of LSIR to elevate things such as regional integration, economic development, foreign aid, and Western and African relations in both research and teaching.Footnote 40
Third, LSIR scholars think about the world in relational terms.Footnote 41 They tend to think about actors in interdependent terms, contrary to some of the versions of IR scholarship that conceptualise actors, such as the state as an independent and atomistic entity.Footnote 42 They reject the statist script in favour of the region, extra-region, or continent.Footnote 43 The main units of analysis for most scholars of LSIR are global, continental, regional, extra-regional, and subnational actors.Footnote 44 When they invoke the state, it is often done in relation to other entities. For them, the state is embedded in entities, including society, subregional/regional/extra-regional/continental, and global structures. Thus, state actions cannot be understood without references to regional organisations such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), extra-regional bodies such as the G5 Sahel, continental entities such as the African Union, and global structures such as international financial institutions.Footnote 45 At a minimum, these entities help African states construct their interests and allow them to exercise agency on the world stage. IR in Legon is therefore taught and studied not from a state-centric orientation, but more from regional and extra-regional perspectives.
In the same spirit that the GIR calls on IR scholars to ensure congruence between IR theory and international political realities,Footnote 46 LSIR teaching, and research are driven by current affairs, international practices, and policy issues. Doctors Darkwa and Attuquayefio of LECIAD captured the policy-oriented and current affairs approach to International Relations scholarship at Legon aptly when they said:
A significant part of post-graduate training in international affairs relates to being alive to current events. Thus, the post-graduate student of international affairs must be an avid consumer of news – both local and foreign. S/he must be able to engage in objective discourse(s) on both domestic issues, as well as international relations. Above all, s/he must carry herself/himself at all times as a distinguished member of the public.Footnote 47
For the LSIR group, there is no debate about the importance of doing policy-relevant research or making IR research relevant for policymakers. Members of the LSIR regularly participate in policy discussions organised by governments and practitioners who often teach in the IP programs in DPS and LECIAD. Some LSIR scholars even go a step further, providing advice to policymakers, sitting on boards created by governments, doing policy work for international organisations, or even joining governments.Footnote 48 There is a revolving door between the LSIR Ivory Tower and the policy world. This revolving door has often raised tension between LSIR's broad commitment to critical scholarship and the pragmatism required to be effective in policy circles. As Emmanuel Hassen found out during the brief stint with the PNDC, the need to be pragmatic while doing critical scholarship can even be dangerous.Footnote 49
Epistemology and methodology
Scholars of the LSIR study, teach, and research international relations from epistemologies of the South. Boaventura de Sousa Santos defines epistemologies of the South as scholarship that ‘enables oppressed social groups to represent the world in their own terms, as part of struggles of resistance against oppression and the knowledge that legitimates it’.Footnote 50 Consistent with epistemologies of the South and criticism of Western parochialism in sections of the IR discipline, LSIR scholars attempt to retrieve silenced and marginalised thoughts in IR, and to show how people of the Global South, especially Africans, can resist oppressive global discourses. Drawing on Nkrumah's neocolonialism arguments, some LSIR scholars seek to show how discourses are part of indirect mechanisms to control, exploit, abuse, and oppress people in the Global South.Footnote 51
The LSIR scholars’ focus on retrieving voices of the marginalised in IRFootnote 52 often leads them to adopt an empiricist approach to knowledge production. The empiricist impulses are based ‘on the cliché that “seeing is believing”’, particularly, on the notion that good scholarship depends primarily on visits to research sites to see things with your ‘own eyes’ and describing them in glorious detail.Footnote 53 Thus, even though they see the value of postmodernist approaches, most LSIR scholars see truth as simply ‘out there’ to be discovered.Footnote 54 They, therefore, reject any notion that knowledge produced from detailed description with a view to providing policy recommendations and academic implications is less analytical or of second-class value. For most of them, precision in the description of the knowledge of the oppressed, and drawing inferences from that knowledge for the weak to resist powerful forces in the international system, is the pinnacle of good scholarship.
The attraction of careful and detailed examination of empirical materials is such that although the LSIR curriculum has always given equal weight to the training of quantitative and qualitative research techniques, most LSIR writings employ qualitative research methods.Footnote 55 Indeed, like the AIR, the GIR, and the PIR scholarship, LSIR scholars are biased in favour of qualitative research.Footnote 56 The most common qualitative research methods employed by the LSIR are case studies, comparative methods, archival research, historical narratives, discourse analysis, content analysis, and interviews.Footnote 57 The case study often involves the use of process tracing, participant observation, and careful description of events. The qualitative orientation of LSIR is similar if not identical to approaches used by AIR and GIR scholars to produce knowledge. Even though the LSIR group and their GIR and PIR counterparts have a preference for qualitative scholarship, many members of the PIR do not share the empiricist-impulses of the former group.Footnote 58
The belief in the idea of truth as correspondence is so strong to the extent that most LSIR scholars have come to see abstraction as a distraction or theorising for theory's sake.Footnote 59 The belief among LSIR scholars that abstract-oriented scholarship is often a diversionary tactic is shaped by the colonial experience. The LSIR group does not want to fall into the trap of the colonial educational logic, which often encouraged many educated Africans to focus on abstract ideas that are far removed from conditions that ordinary Africans live, or conditioned some of the most educated Africans to remain silent on the ills of colonialism and slavery.Footnote 60 This experience has taught the LSIR not only to be wary of knowledge production that privileges too much abstraction but to view the elevation of abstract and theoretical discussions over careful empirical analysis in some sections of the Anglo-American IR community as a continuation of the colonial tactic of distraction.Footnote 61 The influence of the idea (that is, that the preference for abstract discussions/works within the Anglo-American IR community is a diversionary tactic) meant that the LSIR scholars never participated in the great IR debates. The neo-neo debate, the debate between positivism versus post-positivism, and that between rationalism versus constructivism, had no traction among LSIR scholars as they saw them as diversions of attention away from discussions of real-world problems, including intellectual oppression and marginalisation of Global South in IR scholarship.Footnote 62
LSIR scholars’ suspicion of abstract scholarship as a colonial tactic of distraction highlights another difference between them and PIR counterparts. Unlike the LSIR, many of the influential works of PIR works have been very abstract.Footnote 63 The differences notwithstanding, there is no doubt that LSIR scholars and their GIR and PIR counterparts converge on decolonial scholarship, relational ontology, southern epistemologies, and commitment to qualitative research methodology. The similarities become even more apparent when the normative underpinning of the AIR, the GIR, the PIR scholarship, and LSIR are compared.
Shared normative position
Like AIR, GIR, and PIR scholars, the normative goal of the first generation of LSIR scholars was to centre the Global South in general and Africa in particular in IR scholarship. This was reflected in the teaching and academic programming at the Legon in the 1960s. The former head of DPS, Professor Kwame Ninsin, who studied international politics as part of his undergraduate degree in the 1960s, remembered the way IP was taught fondly.Footnote 64 He recounted how their instructors openly encouraged them to take Global South perspectives to examine international politics, and how the topics discussed in class focused on promoting the agenda of the Global South at the time. Describing Mohan as a phenomenal teacher who could lecture for hours without notes, Professor Ninsin pointed out that the teaching of IP reflected the search for a more equitable economic, social, and political international order for the Global South as a whole. This is similar to current efforts by GIR and PIR scholars to centre the Global South in IR scholarship.Footnote 65
In line with the AIR, the GIR, and the PIR scholarship, the first generation of IP scholars also rejected the kind of IR designed as objective science.Footnote 66 The IP scholars neither hid the fact that they sought to change the world order to give a meaningful voice and seat on the world stage to people of the Global South, nor did they conceal their goal of challenging hegemonic knowledge that often legitimatises oppression, inequality, colonialism, and suppresses voices of people of the Global South. Likewise, the AIR, the GIR, and the PIR movements do not conceal their demands for greater diversity and voice for the non-West in IR scholarship.Footnote 67
Consistent with AIR, GIR, and PIR works, the first generation of IP scholars also rejected the idea that the dominant liberalism and realism analytical frameworks were the best lenses for studying international relations. They even rejected the Marxist label even though some of the ideas intersected with the Marxist school of IR.Footnote 68 Mohan, who is widely credited as ‘one of the first to introduce socialist ideas to Legon students’, and Manu, who disliked the way Western Marxists examined Africa, created a distance between their ideas and Western socialism.Footnote 69 They did so by emphasising issues, such as: equitable distribution of power and wealth between former colonial powers and newly independent states; Western and Soviet machination and racism in Africa; the search for a new international order; social justice; full independence from colonialism and neocolonialism; and other issues Western Marxists do not like to give analytical weight to, oftentimes conveniently preferring to look the other way.Footnote 70 The distance that the IP scholars wanted to see between their scholarship and that of Western realists, liberals, Marxists, or socialists in part explains why the former preferred to call themselves Pan-Africanists or Nkrumahists/revolutionary academics, or non-conformist scholars.Footnote 71 The conscious efforts that the first generation made to theorise and discuss issues that many Western realists, liberals, Marxists, or socialists ignore or feel uncomfortable talking about are similar to the decisions made by the AIR, GIR and PIR scholars to focus on issues such as racism and oppression that many IR realists, liberals, Marxists, or socialists often find uncomfortable to talk about.Footnote 72
The decaying pillars of the Legon School (1980–9)
The LSIR began to decline in the early 1980s as a result of political, economic, and ideational factors. First, the emergence of the populist military governments, led by Jerry John Rawlings in 1979, created conditions that contributed to the decline of decolonial scholarship. The PNDC turned strained relations between DPS and the first military government of Rawlings, Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), into open hostilities.Footnote 73 While PNDC members saw the department as dominated by opinionated and elitist scholars who are only good at critiquing, several DPS faculty members saw the PNDC as made of a bunch of thugs unfit to rule Ghana.Footnote 74 The PNDC's hostility towards the DPS made several of its faculty members leave Ghana in the 1980s.Footnote 75 The PNDC's perceived or real threat to the DPS encouraged the faculty to focus on the PNDC's activities, politics, and policies.Footnote 76 The faculty became so obsessed with the PNDC that even the most internationalist of the IP members spent most of their energies on Ghanaian politics.Footnote 77 Furthermore, several decolonial scholars at Legon who had sympathy for the PNDC government, including Emmanuel Hansen, joined the regime.Footnote 78
Second, the PNDC's introduction of the neoliberal structural adjustment programmes in Ghana in 1983 had several negative impacts on the Ghanaian academy in general, especially on decolonial scholarship. The removal of government subsidies as part of the reforms cut significant funding to the University of Ghana and the DPS. This made highly trained Ghanaians, including some DPS members leave Ghana ‘for better-paid employment, resulting in a massive brain drain’.Footnote 79 The DPS faculty who remained had to do other work, especially consultancy services and extra teaching, to supplement their income.Footnote 80 This developed patchy and strained research efforts as the faculty members had little time to do basic research and engage in critical scholarship.Footnote 81 Some of the DPS faculty members created their own think tanks, while others joined existing or newly formed consultancy organisations and research centres.Footnote 82
The higher monetary reward provided by consultancy services changed the focus of research of several DPS faculty members.Footnote 83 Instead of studying critical and Global South-relevant research topics, the focus of research shifted towards issues of concern to Western governments and international donors. Topics such as structural adjustments, liberal democracy, decentralisation, human rights, and civil society organisations where external funding was available became the focus of research while African and Global South-inspired topics like the search for a new international order, African unity, and indigenous ways of knowing were neglected. The critical scholarship that started in the 1960s was pushed aside from the 1980s onwards in favour of mainstream or problem-solving scholarship. The few faculty members who did not follow the consultancy money and the self-censorship that went with it, or did not find the mimicry type of scholarship appealing, were often demoralised or had no research money to do any sustained decolonial scholarship.Footnote 84
Third, ideational struggle in the DPS contributed to the decline of decolonial scholarship. A major ideational battle started as soon as DPS was created in 1962. The DPS faculty members in the subfields of comparative politics and political theory, most of whom schooled in Loxbridge traditions, did not fully embrace the anti-colonial approach to scholarship.Footnote 85 Led by Kweku Forson, they joined hands with the Loxbridge educated counterparts in other departments at Legon to oppose the decolonial turn at the University of Ghana.Footnote 86 The strong opposition by the comparativists and the theorists on the one hand, and the stand of IP scholars, on the other hand, divided the DPS into Nkrumahists (that is, decolonial scholars) and anti-Nkrumahists (that is, conformist/mainstream academics) camp.Footnote 87 Against the background of the Cold War politics at the time, the division set off intense internal battles in the DPS over the teaching and research of political science in Ghana. Senior management of the University led by Conor Cruise O'Brien, an Irishman, sided with the Loxbridge group by appointing Forson instead of Manu as the head of DPS against the Nkrumah Government's wish.Footnote 88 This together with the departure of Mohan to Sheffield University in the late 1960s led to the first decline of decolonial and IP scholarship in the DPS.Footnote 89 As Professor Ninsin pointed out, Yaw Manu became the lonely Nkrumahist/decolonial voice in the department in the late 1960s.Footnote 90
A new generation of anti-colonial scholars joined Manu in the early 1970s and together they recentred critical scholarship. Joined by other critical scholars in sister departments, such as law, the new scholars picked up from where Mohan left off. The appointment of Manu as the head of DPS in 1973 encouraged the new crop of scholars to take the decolonial scholarship back to the centre of the DPS. The fierce struggle between the conformists and the decolonial scholars for the soul of the political science split the DPS. The ‘division, however, promoted scholarship’, turning the political science programme into one of the most revered academic units in Ghana.Footnote 91 The outstanding image the department acquired in the 1970s was such that its weekly seminars, which often pit conformists against decolonial academics, were not only heavily packed by leading scholars at Legon, but the presentations shaped national conversations and often appeared in Ghana's national newspapers.Footnote 92 The influence of the IP group was such that by the mid-1970s, the centring of European (mainly British) political history in the study of politics in Ghana had been replaced by an analysis of African and global subjects.Footnote 93
However, the emergence of the PNDC, which contributed to the departure of leading decolonial scholars, neoliberalisation of knowledge production, prioritisation of the study of PNDC policies, the mainstream/conformist nature of the promotion system at Legon and the rise of comparativists such as Kwame Ninsin, Emmanuel Gyimah-Boadi, Joseph Ayee, and Mike Quaye as the most senior members of DPS from 1985 onwards led to the decentring of decolonial scholarship in DPS. With the support of Forson and Drah, the comparativists turned the attention of the DPS to domestic Ghanaian politics. The dominance of comparative scholarship was such that by the end of the 1990s, the DPS had become largely a department for the study of Ghanaian and comparative political issues.Footnote 94Although the IP group continued to be a collection of critical scholars, decolonial scholarship was pushed to the margins of DPS in the 1980s and remained firmly rooted on the margins up to today.Footnote 95
The control of the DPS by comparativists together with widespread concern by the PNDC government that the department is producing mainly conservative and neocolonial thinkers many of whom were ‘not fit-for-purpose’ made the critical voices within the PNDC develop a plan to strengthen the main pillars of the LSIR at Legon.Footnote 96 Led by the anti-colonial PNDC members who were lecturers at Legon during the heydays of the decolonial scholarship, the PNDC government proposed to Legon administrators the idea of creating a centre for postgraduate teaching and research of international affairs.Footnote 97 In 1989, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ghana (MFA) led by the anti-imperialist Dr Obed Asamoah and the University of Ghana administration signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to create LECIAD within the DPS to train the next generation of critical International Relations thinkers who will take up public service positions in Ghana and other African countries.Footnote 98
The strengthening of the LSIR pillars (1990s–present)
The creation of LECIAD was supposed to rekindle the best tradition of LSIR at the postgraduate level. Similar to the first generation of IP scholarship, LECIAD programming is designed for both Ghanaians and citizens of other African countries. As a result, the LECIAD is ‘expected to allocate one-third of its intake to students from other African countries’.Footnote 99 The choice of ‘international affairs’ as the Centre's title rather than international relations is also instructive. It is meant to signal that the Centre will: first, contribute to building the human capacity of the MFA and other public institutions in Ghana and other African states; second, produce policy-relevant research; third, serve as the bridge between Legon and public institutions in Ghana, Africa, and around the world; and finally, it is supposed to prevent the Centre from becoming a site for regurgitation of Anglo-American IR ideas and practices.Footnote 100 Although Anglo-American IR discourses and theories have infiltrated into the teaching of the Centre, as Linda Darkwa and Philip Attuquayefio indicated, the approach to scholarship at the LECIAD is distinct from the Western style of IR. According to them, the inability of Western-oriented theories to offer appropriate options for responding to the post-Cold War problems in Africa led scholars at the Centre to focus more on practitioners-led responses to international affairs, to revise the guiding philosophy, and to give volume to Africa's experiences and Southern voices.Footnote 101
In addition, LECIAD's approach to IR does not follow the version of Western social sciences’ tradition that Claude Ake argued is ‘heavily biased in favour of capitalism’.Footnote 102 Rather reminiscent of the works of the 1960s and 1970s IP generation, the Centre is more focused on critical IR, social justice, and equity issues. This is evident in the teaching and research of the current crop of faculty at the Centre. For instance, while Peace Medie's work deconstructs Western feminism and exposes the gender inequities in the practices of IR, the plight of vulnerable groups in the international system such as refugees, migrants, and internally displaced persons have preoccupied the attention of Amanda Coffie.Footnote 103 Similarly, Yao Gebe, who co-teaches the IR theory course with Coffie, mixes structuralism and critical realism in such a way that his writing and teaching resemble the work of the subaltern realists, although he does not use that label.Footnote 104 Furthermore, Juliana Appiah's research and teaching seem not only to be a continuation of the regionalist and continentalist tradition of the 1960s; her work is best read as part of the IR scholarship that seeks to retrieve silences and marginalised pieces of knowledge in the international system.Footnote 105 Thus, although LECIAD fellows do not openly fly the critical IR school or decolonial banners, they are as anti-establishment as much as their 1960s and 1970s IP colleagues.
Another area where LECIAD and the 1960s Legon IP intersect is the critical way in which scholars of both eras see the liberal international order. Like their counterpart in the 1960s and 1970s, LECIAD fellows neither seeks to celebrate problem-solving IRFootnote 106 and Western civilisation, nor does the Centre's scholarship blindly defend and reify the current liberal international order as much as some mainstream Anglo-American IR scholars do.Footnote 107 LECIAD's approach is critical of the current international order, and the teaching and research at the Centre often draw attention to the inequities in the international system. In other words, while the new generation of IR scholars at Legon does not loudly call for a new international order, or have self-described themselves as revolutionary scholars, they are against some aspects of the liberal international order as much as their 1960s and 1970s IP colleagues.
Moreover, like the IP teaching and research in the 1960s and 1970s, the approach to IR at LECIAD is current affairs driven. The ease with which the IP group in the 1960s and 1970s moved into the policy world and back to the academy is indistinguishable from the way LECIAD fellows are embedded in policy communities. The works of Darkwa and Attuquayefio are illustrative of the kind of policy-oriented research and teaching that the LECIAD fellows do.Footnote 108 Both are enmeshed in the African policy communities. Their research often feeds into policies of the governments and IOs, especially those in Africa. To enhance the link between policy circles and LECIAD, the Centre provides platforms for policymakers and diplomats to share their thoughts, views, and ideas. Besides hosting regular biweekly seminars for practitioners to share their work, at least one of the faculty positions at LECIAD is reserved for former ambassadors.Footnote 109 The Centre's focus on policy-relevant research, African issues, and current affairs ensured that LECIAD's approaches dovetail with IP teaching and research at Legon in the 1960s and 1970s.
Even though LECIAD is supposed to take IP scholarship that started in the 1960s to the next level, it is important to note that the Centre has struggled to reproduce the best tradition of the latter. The first generation of LECIAD fellows was unable to shape the intellectual conversation in Ghana and Africa the way the IP scholars did in the 1960s and 1970s. Many factors account for LECIAD's struggles. Poor funding of the Centre and the neoliberalisation of Ghana's public sector, including university education, are major contributors. The implementation of the structural adjustment programme in Ghana during the formative years of LECIAD meant that its fellows could not resist the temptations of the consultancy culture that engulfed Legon from the 1980s onwards. The penetration of the consultancy scholarship and money, which moved attention away from basic and public interest research, made it difficult for LECIAD to prosecute its research agenda consistently. The consultancy culture also made some fellows of LECIAD focus on topics of interest to the donor community rather than those of concerns to Ghana, creating a wedge between LECIAD and the MFA. The negative effect of the wedge is being felt deeply by LECIAD today. The leadership of Legon has attempted to address the situation by recruiting a new generation of socially conscious, critically minded, research-oriented, and predominantly female identifiable scholars in the last few years. Only time will tell if the new crop of scholars will be able to revive the best tradition of the LSIR.
Conclusion
The article sought to show that a vibrant IR intellectual tradition has existed in Ghana since the 1960s. At its core, the Legon IR programme, which the manuscript called the LSIR, coalescence around a critique of Eurocentrism in IR, relational ontology, southern epistemologies, decoloniality, preference for qualitative research methodology, interdisciplinarity, policy-oriented scholarship, promotion of African agency, and a pursuit for equitable distribution of power among states. This equity-oriented IR scholarship came out of a struggle between colonial education reflected in the research and curriculum of the University College of the Gold Coast, and the process to decolonise knowledge in Ghana in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The decolonisation of knowledge, which entailed dismantling the foothold that the University of Cambridge, the University of London, and the University of Oxford had established over higher education in Ghana, led to the creation of the University of Ghana, Legon out of the UCGC in 1961. The Department of Political Science, under which international relations was studied, was established in 1962 to help prosecutive the new mandate of Legon. The LSIR emerged from this decolonial project.
The article showed that core ideas of the Legon IR intellectual tradition intersect with many ongoing IR debates. First, efforts by the LSIR to shift IR teaching and research from Eurocentric subjects to Global South issues, especially those that resonate with resident Africans, overlap with the ongoing discussion of African agency, centring of Global South voices in IR, as well as the current campaign to add non-Western perspectives and experiences to mainstream IR. In other words, LSIR scholars brought diversity of thoughts, multiplicity of experiences, and equity-related issues to the IR table from the 1960s onwards. The LSIR story raises the question regarding other knowledge that mainstream IR scholars may be losing by not moving beyond the current ‘add and stir’Footnote 110 engagement to seriously bring on the mainstream IR board works, and ideas produced by African-based IR scholars and centres of scholarship. Who knows the other IR knowledge we could gain from careful study of writings of African scholars, including the extensive manuscripts in Timbuktu and other centres of scholarship in pre/postcolonial Africa?
Second, the insistence by scholars of the LSIR that deconstruction of colonial knowledge and excavation of colonial exploitation should be at the heart of IR scholarship dovetails with the push in some IR quarters to centre impacts of imperialism, colonial exploitation, and the colonial experience in IR scholarship.Footnote 111 Yet, the LSIR story provides a cautionary tale of how not to do decolonial IR. The LSIR cautioned against too much abstraction. The LSIR scholars do not only see too much abstraction as part of a distraction tactic by those seeking to maintain status quo knowledge, power, and privilege, but its elitist and exclusive nature is antithetical to the LSIR approach to knowledge production. For them, the best way to dismantle colonial episteme and to create equity-oriented IR knowledge is through careful empirical analysis. Thus, the LSIR provides food for thought for the anti-empirical impulses in sections of the decolonial movements in European and North American IR communities.
Third, the LSIR's focus on relationality and entities other than the state as the main units of analysis is in line with the work of Western-based IR scholars who place analytical premium on informal actors and processes. But the LSIR scholarship suggests that the discipline in the West would benefit from a move beyond individual non-state actors and processes to a situation where intersections between these informal actors and processes become the central focus of analysis. Also, by explicitly placing individuals/communities rather than governments at the centre of the concentric circle with states and international institutions radiating around them, the LSIR scholars provide the IR communities in North America and Europe, where this concentric circle logic is not prevalent, something to ponder and possibly incorporate into their analysis.
Fourth, the effort by the LSIR to ensure that IR scholarship feeds into policies and their commitment to the idea that IR works should lead to policy recommendations raise an interesting question about the best ways to disseminate IR knowledge. Although this has its pitfalls and can be a source of frustration for those who like to do scholarship for its own sake, the move could make the discipline more relevant to policymakers and other communities outside the field of IR. Also, the LSIR scholars' preference for policy recommendation opens a space for an interesting conversation between the current LSIR group and Western-based colleagues who operate in both policy circles and the academic world. Moreover, the commitment by LSIR group to equitable distribution of power and privilege in the international system creates an opening for collaboration between LSIR scholars and Western IR scholars interested in justice and fairness issues.
Finally, the LSIR story illustrates in a profound way the challenge of creating decolonial IR knowledge and equity-oriented scholarship in a neoliberal world. The article showed the resistance from scholars who wanted to maintain the status quo and how neoliberal forces impacted the scholarship of the LSIR. Those seeking to establish a more progressive IR programmes and research agendas elsewhere in the world may have to find a way to overcome the pushback from both conservative and neoliberal forces. Thus, the LSIR story is told not only to show that a lively decolonial and equity-seeking IR community had persisted in Ghana since 1960s but to demonstrate what the current generation of mainstream IR scholars can gain from paying close attention to the works of IR communities in Africa.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding the Informal IR Lab at King's University College where this manuscript was produced, and to the 2020/21 Lab members, namely Jessica Afara, Zainab Al-Jaiashi, Jackson Tadeusz Van Bakel, David Carson, Benjamin Douglas Drummond, Victoria Hinkson, Elizabeth Kozak, Nordiah Newell, Eunice Oladejo, and Nathalie Playford for research assistance. Also, I thank anonymous reviewers and the Review of International Studies team for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. The views expressed here and any remaining errors in the article are mine.
