African states in world markets: Systemic hierarchies and the postcolonial International Political Economy of governing Senegal

Description

Transcript

[music]

Speaker 1: On the go sprint lectures on African mobilities podcast by Africa Multiple.

Speaker 1: Welcome everybody to this session of the sprint lectures. Today, we are glad to have another talk entitled African states in world markets systemic hierarchies and the postcolonial international political economy of governing Senegal. And this talk is going to be given by Kai Kottenbrock. So Kai, I think you will have to make a self-introduction. The first time I am meeting you, so probably could know more about first of all your work and other things before you start the talk. Thank you, Kai.

Speaker 2: Thank you Paddy. Yeah, my name is Kai Kottenbrock. I'm one of the four new junior research group leaders at the Africa Multiple cluster of excellency at our beloved University of Bayreuth. And I'm leading a group on the topic of economic and monetary sovereignty in West Africa compared where we have four case studies Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal and Ivory Coast. And I myself am doing the research on Senegal at the moment. And the paper that I sent around is my attempt of first attempt of making both conceptual and empirical point about the ways Senegal has tried to navigate the waters of world market pressures in post-independence period. So I'm gonna make three points. So first, I'm gonna introduce all of you non IR IPE people to the disciplinary intervention that I'm trying to make. And then we'll talk about anarchy and hierarchy problematique and the return of systemic questions in the face of climate and financial crises. I will try to develop the notion of systemic hierarchies which is at the heart of this paper along the two dimensions of global volatilities and domestic durabilities. And then give you some empirical and historical insights on how Senegalese political economy has changed and how governments have tried to change and alter their submission or subordination to specific hierarchies. And I will do this with a reflection on the term immobilities of funds, of prices of exports and of social relations in peanut agriculture. So I'm very glad there is historians and geographers in the room who are really experts on these kind of questions. So what might appear odd to a political science audience is probably quite normal for geographers for example to be talking of questions of agriculture for example and climate. So my discipline overall discipline is political science and my subdisciplines are international relations and international political economy. International relations was founded as a discipline of foreign policy consulting basically. So thinkers were trying to make to give advice to rulers and leaders and presidents and governments of how to rule more effectively to increase international standing of their own state. So it was founded as a as a discipline that was international that then turned into international relations that was always quite close to power. And because of this attachment to the state and to the government somehow or that might be one of the reasons for it, it became a very state centered discipline. So people were thinking about world politics as that which is going on between states. And since there is no world government but there is let's say nearly 200 states today, they are all formally equal and in anarchical relations with each other because there is no world government. So conceptually international relations has for a very long time tended to think about world order in terms of anarchy because it's you know what what is happening in the world is the interaction of states which are formally sovereign and formally equal. Of course, there was always a little bit of a debate about hegemonies like the US leadership, but conceptually it was mostly focusing on

Speaker 1: what we call the billiard ball model where states are interacting with each other like billiard balls. And the notion of hierarchy popped up here and there in the last twenty thirty years but wasn't really used anymore. And hierarchy denotes obviously the opposite of anarchy and comes from the term and I will develop that a little bit later in the Greek hierarkhes, the sacred ruler. So it's a notion that denotes domination and inequality. And maybe triggered by questions after the financial crisis where it became really clear that some states and some actors were suffering more from the financial crisis than others, the return of debt crises and also the climate crisis in recent years, as well as what in international relations has become known as threats to the so-called liberal international order, questions of inequality and hierarchies in the global realm have come back to the fore. So International Organization, the most influential, most important American journal in this discipline of international relations and IPE, for example recently published a special issue on the liberal international order which is it is sort of a consensus is an apt denominator for the world we live in. We are living in a liberal international order and this liberal international order is under threat. There is crisis. The rise of Trump was kind of disconcerting. Then Brexit took place which was like a rupture in liberal teleological positive thought. So there is self-searching and soul searching going on in the discipline of international relations because things that seemed normal and harmonious are not so certain anymore. So this brings an opening I think to consider questions of global inequality and systemic questions as well anew because things are not as settled and clear anymore and it's not as easy to talk about an orderly interstate world anymore because everything is up in the air. And the threat of China obviously also is lurking. So for a discipline that is close to power, that was quite western dominated and eurocentric, the threat of China is, the rise of China is a serious problem. And this brings an opening as well to new considerations of hierarchies. And as I said, in this paper that I sent around and which I try to develop, and I am trying to do that with the notion of systemic hierarchies. Surfing the, there was a slight proposition a few years ago by Ayesha Sarakol, a professor of international relations at Cambridge University who was arguing, well, we have to look at hierarchies much more. And there is two understandings of it, one between actors and also systemic questions should come to the fore. And in the paper I try to develop the notion of systemic as something that is recurrent, encompassing and with an identifiable logic. And I am coming at this notion of systemic or systematicity from the theory of capitalism basically and I am trying to break this down into several components. So under capitalism interaction is ruled by competition, the price mechanism plays a very important role, capital as the compulsion to invest money making a profit in the process to have more money is an important part of this dynamic. And there is like a global division of labor that is animating this. Of course there is lots of debates about the proper usage of the term about naming our global system. So there is debate about racial capitalism, about racism, about gender. In the end all these different intersectional perspectives would have to be made sense of together.

Speaker 1: But I'm focusing here like on on the economic dimensions uh that come with with capitalist competition. And hierarchy then means when it is systemic, that certain actors uh when they want to interact with each other are have to subordinate themselves and have to adapt to global processes or global relations that they cannot themselves shape uh massively. So they just have to subordinate themselves, which I would say is a classic way of um of the meaning of hierarchy. You are under a hierarchy under the sacred ruler when you have to bow your head, when you have to adapt, when you have to subordinate. And I think this is an apt terminology to make sense of what Senegalese governments have been trying um over recent decades. Uh and to to make that clear, I break down this notion of systemic hierarchies into two dimensions. First, global volatilities and second domestic durabilities. So the Senegalese government, which I'm then focusing on, has to subordinate itself, has to react to, has to adapt to global volatilities coming with the volatility of external funding, for example, but also global volatilities originating in massive movements in world market prices for important exports. Um and within the country, longstanding colonial path dependencies hamper the self-determination or the room for maneuver for the Senegalese government in specific ways. And I am looking more specifically most specifically at the attempts to restructure the agricultural sector since independence. And it is not a monolith. So agriculture in Senegal has definitely changed substantially over the last sixty years. But it's taken there has been massive setbacks and it was very difficult. And also there is a dilemma, which I will focus on later on, of dealing with the peanut economy that has not really been solved until today, sixty years after independence. And I try to make sense of this with the term domestic durabilities. So it takes a long time, it's very hard for the government to to shape social relations within their own country. So this is also something that in a way they have to adapt to, they have to subordinate themselves to because they can't change the institutions uh in the blink of an eye. It takes a long time and it's difficult. So global and domestic dimension. Um I think this these durabilities and volatilities in global and domestic relations fit quite perfectly um the mechanisms and and and hierarchy relations that I'm trying to analyze in the paper and in my broader work. So the flow of finance, for example, or government funds. Sometimes it's very forthcoming, sometimes it is withheld. So when it is withheld, it's immobile, it's staying. When it's coming, it's useful. Also exports, sometimes there is a better harvest, sometimes there is a worse harvest. And there's, I mean, the climate processes play a massive role in determining how the harvest will be. But also import and export relations with barriers to trade impact on the mobility of these particular commodities. And um the society in general and specific social or agricultural economic sectors are also mobile or immobile in different ways. So most people in Senegal are still in some way or the other connected to their home country or home village. And some parts of the family are also are all engaged in some respect in some kind of peanut growing. On the one hand, but also then there is this important influence of the Mouride religious Muslim societies and brotherhoods who are playing a big role in the rural areas shaping this peanut agriculture and um

Speaker 1: people are moving in and out of these relations, are moving in and out of cultivating peanuts depending on again how profitable this agriculture in a particular point of time is or to what extent they have to fall back on some kind of self-sufficiency agriculture in particular kinds of points in time. So, this is just a graph on the volatility. So I will show you three graphs. This graph exists to underline the notion of global volatility and of the mobility of funds. So you see here distinguished along the dimensions of the chronological graph, distinguished by four presidential regimes, starting with Leopold Senghor, moving on to Abdoulaye Wade and then Macky Sall. And you see here on the low blue line is the import excess that Senegal displays. So it has always historically imported more than it exports. This has to be financed. You need to earn money to finance these imports. And on the other side, in the upper part of the graph, you see different sources of funding: multilateral credit, bilateral credit by commercial banks, bonds and aid flows. So you see very basically, I mean, and this is, I'm showing you this graph not to analyze it in detail because this is a sprint lecture, but to just show you the massive volatility that exists. So the Senegalese government at a very basic level, I mean, you all know that, right? I'm not telling you anything new, is exposed to massive financing volatilities. It is exposed to them, it is subordinated to them, it is underlying a hierarchical relation here because these actors who are willing to give these funds, is it commercial banks, is it the IMF, is it aid givers or the receipts from exports or the prices of imports, this is not something that the Senegalese government can control. So it's systematically and hierarchically subordinated to them. So this is to sort of, and in the context of the paper, to strengthen this argument that this very basic notion of systemic hierarchies needs to be part of our vocabulary in international relations and international political economy. And similarly, the second component is this exposure to global world market prices, another dimension of global volatilities. And I'm just giving you here the nominal value of franc CFA peanut export values from 1965 to 2015. You see here it's a massive up and down, mostly determined by climate conditions, but also obviously by world market prices and the agricultural choices that farmers then make as a function of these prices at a particular point in time. Sometimes these prices were very high because there was high demand, sometimes they're very low. At the moment, interestingly, there is much more demand, and I will get to this in a second, because China has begun to import so much arachide de bouche, so eating peanuts directly with the farmers in the urban areas that now the line is going up and it's continuing to go up. So peanut is undergoing a renewed boom. So that is about the first dimension of systemic hierarchy, the global volatilities dependency on funding and on the other hand world market prices. Domestic durabilities, I just want to highlight with this graph which shows a selection of agricultural, mostly agricultural products, but particular export products. You see here that there is a change in value, but you also see that it's not just peanuts. So the peanuts, cereals and vegetable oils. It has become after Senegal was dependent to eighty percent on peanut exports at independence in 1960, this has diversified. So domestic durability doesn't mean that everything stays the same, but that over a long period of time, the government has actually been able to diversify the export structure of Senegalese economy. But this came with massive setbacks.

Speaker 1: Yeah, Mamadou Dia was one of the first, was the first prime minister under Léopold Senghor. And I did an interview with the head of the German, of the Senegalese peanut marketing agency in Dakar recently. And he told me that Senegal doit se libérer de l'arachide en s'appuyant sur l'arachide. So, we need to liberate ourselves from the peanuts by banking on the peanuts. And this is exactly the conundrum, the paradox that Senegal has been in for the last sixty years. It has managed to liberate itself somewhat, but the fact that the peanut growing is becoming more important again shows that a real liberation from the peanut has not taken place. And it has also been important to stick with the peanut because it was just the only export product for quite some time. So I think this Mamadou Dia quote, who was then sent to prison for twelve years because he became too transformative for Senghor and French interests at the time, encapsulate well the dilemmas and the systemic hierarchies that Senegal and Senegalese governments have continued to be subordinated to. I want to end with some possible implications for our mobilities section and the cluster more broadly. So I think that similarly to IR, so international relations and IPE, we would profit from taking hierarchies and inequalities between actors and beyond, so systemic hierarchies, more seriously, and not dissolve them a lot in complex terms like multiplicity, reflexivity, relationality, where we might may lose sight of these very basic structured and systemic relations. They are also important, I think, these terms that are stressing the complexity and relationality. But we should also focus, I mean, in the self-description of the mobilities section, inequality features, and it's clear that we all are interested in that. But I think conceptually it's worthwhile to take these very basic systemic hierarchies a bit more seriously. And that entails also to think afresh about today's systems and structures at the national, regional and global level. Thank you very much for your attention. I'm very much looking forward to your criticism and questions and remarks.

Speaker 2: Okay, thank you very much Kai for this very wonderful and informative talk. It really opens up new horizons for thinking about how maybe possibilities of doing further mobility studies following things like hierarchies. I am already thinking about hierarchization of space, for example, looking at Senegal in terms of maybe the global systems that are operating to try and subordinate Senegal. Now, without much thinking, let's just open up the lines. Yes, Martin?

Speaker 3: Yeah. Thank you, Kai. I have three questions. Do you see in the efforts to overcome the peanut economy in Senegal or in other strategies that you or others have identified in Senegal something like a Senegalese way? So maybe a translation of what Césaire calls for, not responding to the receipts of the West, but reinventing a synthesis of traditional contemporary approaches? Would be my first question. Then a word about mobilities. So a question about the conceptualization of mobility. I mean, I think we agree that capital does not really flow, but it jumps in the form of financial products charged with power asymmetries and then jump away again. Do you have an idea how this particular form of mobility of, let's say money could be conceptualized? And the third question would be, your approach, can this approach be transferred or how far can this approach be transferred to other economies in West Africa to better understand what is going on? I see Kamal Dongho here, let's say in Benin with cotton. Or does it, you mentioned these presidents, Senegalese presidents, or does it depend on the personal agendas of presidents? You know, we have in Benin now we have a president who is copying the Rwandan model, for example. Okay, that's from my side. Thank you.

Speaker 3: Sorry, I just had to go get a pen because these were such...

Speaker 1: challenging questions. And the first question, I would just say, I've been as a political scientist at the moment still quite governmental and in the Plan Sénégal Émergent, so the plan emerging Senegal that Macky Sall has been pursuing since two thousand twelve. I don't see much of, let's say, special Senegalese strategies. It's very classic strategies. Let's build stadiums, let's build conference centers, let's build high-speed trains. Let's also develop the peanut sector, funnily, which Abdoulaye Wade, the previous president, he really wanted to get away from the tyranny, so-called tyranny of the peanuts and didn't mention it even anymore. So I think it's a classic industrialization modernization agenda, at least at the current governmental level. But yeah, I'm still at the early stages of the research, so maybe some other more, as you say, Tharian approaches might surface after more research.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the conceptual question on the mobility thing, this is something I cannot do here on the spot. It's a very challenging question. So capital jumps, capital flows and how does money come in there. I think we should do a workshop on that because I could... I don't know how much you like conceptual theoretical thinking. I love it. I think we could do something about this. The third one, yeah, I mean absolutely. So what we've been trying in the team, so the comparison or the applicability to other cases. We've been trying as a very first step to analyze all the historical evolution of the export structures, for example, of the four countries that we're looking at. And I think it's highly instructive. I don't know about the Benin case, how high was the utter dependence on cotton. But Senegal is quite special in a certain way that it was so monocultural. I don't know about the other countries yet, but Ghana and Ivory Coast have all been from the start of independence being a bit more varied. Nigeria now is a bit similar in terms of oil dependence, but that comes with other challenges. So I think this approach of systematically looking at how post-colonial governments try to get away from the totally overpowering degree of submission to colonial structures and world market dependence is a valid approach because at the heart of it is the question of government finances because governments do politics by spending money. And they get finances through exportation and taxation and aid. And systematically as political scientists focusing on that, I think opens research problematiques that are not explored enough in my disciplines of international relations and international political economy, especially with a view to the global south. But that again is discipline specific because political science is so dominated by research on the US and Europe, which is slightly different, I think, in geography, which had a global south focus, I think, I have the impression, for longer and more broadly. But thanks for these great questions.

Speaker 2: Thank you. Thank you. We count very much on you to for developing a mobility approach to capital. Thank you.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Um, thank you. I don't see any other hands up. Maybe I could now ask my own question, which is a little bit strange that you're going to hear it. What is special about this topic of hierarchies in the context of Senegal? Because I could see hierarchies almost everywhere. Like I could, it feels for me like when you begin to look at the idea of hierarchies as creation of field of subordination and domination, then it's almost everywhere because it doesn't have to be in Senegal. So what is particularly special about Senegal or in the context of, let's say, global south-global north relations? Could we begin to imagine that hierarchies are pre-designed and located somewhere and it has a unidirectional pattern?

Speaker 1: That it moves from one end to the other and it cannot be reversed. At one point you have Senegal setting its own hierarchies.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, in a way I agree with you that hierarchy, you can find hierarchies everywhere. And intra-social or internal hierarchies, let's say between the urban elite and the rural farmers, for example, are also extremely important. As you see from my presentation, I'm focusing most here on the exposure to the world market and global relations and foreign funding. And the attempts of the government to transmit these pressures and these hierarchies that they underlie by reshaping their own domestic political economy and dealing with their own society. So, I think the challenge that you raise is, does it make sense to speak about hierarchies at all because they are ubiquitous, they are everywhere? I think that's a good question and I think it connects to what I was trying to say at the very end. I have the impression that in the language that we use in the cluster, we tend to dissolve many very clear-cut relations of hierarchy that are identifiably unequal or hierarchical in a language of flow relations, multiplicity, which rather hides the simplicity of some of these relations as they are very clear-cut. I don't know if that's a good response to your complex question, but yeah, that's the one I can come up with at the moment. But thanks.

Speaker 3: We'll take Robin and then we come back to Joel.

Speaker 4: Hello everyone. Thanks Kai for the presentation. I really found it very interesting. The conceptual debate, which is definitely, I mean, it reminded me of some of my BA classes in international relations. Of course the level was much higher, but I always enjoyed the billiards playing with...

Speaker 1: Ah, you knew that term?

Speaker 4: Yes, it's crazy. I mean, how can you come up with something like that? So I wanted to challenge a bit. Probably you might say to me that it doesn't fit at all into your framework, but I was wondering about the role of farmers, of companies, like actually the role of market structures in your approach of systemic hierarchies. I mean, of course obviously there was a shift, like a transformation of the peanut industry, peanut markets, market structures in Senegal. I don't know much about it, but I guess the access to fertilizers, to seeds, to the tools changed probably. So I don't know if and how far it fits into your approach. I mean, of course you're more interested on the state level, but still the relation between the state and farmers or companies might have changed. Don't know if you observed anything during your fieldwork. It would be interesting to find out a bit more about this.

Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks. I've been trying to trace the history of the four, I don't know how you call that, huileries, the oil processing production sites, and the approach to, as you say, provide fertilizers, set the price, the annual price for the harvests and all that. And it's also been like an eternal back and forth. So nationalization after independence, reprivatization after a massive debt crisis of the farmers in the late seventies because the state had been imprudent with his funding. And then also in the two thousand and basically two years ago, renationalization after another round of privatization of the state peanut marketing agency while these four huileries have all been sold to mostly foreign companies. Only one is still run by the Senegalese. So for me that also shows it's a constant attempt to try, you know, they tried what they called African socialism for more or less like development-led or state-led development. Then they tried structural adjustment, very neoliberal approaches. Now it's kind of a mix, not really ideologically clear. But the underlying fact remains.

Speaker 1: That government finances continue to be extremely volatile, that the ability to really make long-term policies, long-term planning continues to be low because all the export products are still, I mean, non-processed goods. The exposure to volatility remains basically the same. And this trial-and-error approach about nationalization, privatization just underlines this. So it seems to me that unless you are China with a massive domestic market and basically an ultra-authoritarian state since Mao, for small countries with small populations and also arid areas like Senegal, under these particular world market conditions, there is not much that can actually be done apart from some, you know, muddling through slight diversification of the agriculture, a bit of more food sufficiency. But a real take-off, I think it's totally unrealistic to think like that. The entire development logic applying applied in the entire sector to these cases, I think it's utopian actually, and ideological also in a way.

Speaker 2: Okay, Joël.

Speaker 3: Yes, thanks. Can you tell us something about the agency of the political leaders that you are looking at? And I am thinking of, you start your paper with Macky Sall and then you postulate a strong continuity between Senghor and Macky Sall, but obviously they are not acting at all in the same country. You know, Senegal coming from three something million inhabitants to today sixteen or seventeen million inhabitants, Macky Sall is facing a huge political competition which Senghor did not have to face. So the domestic durability that you're pointing at, how much agency do these leaders have in terms of gatekeeping, in terms of adapting, diversifying?

Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's a really important question and it's brutally hard to have a good answer. So for example yesterday I was discussing with my colleague here in the house, a philosopher from UCAD in Dakar, and he was saying, yeah sure, I mean, if the government has the political will and spent the money differently, of course we could get rid of our dependency on the peanuts. And I would like to agree, but I'm not sure. But I think this agency question is extremely important. I could say more about this I think with a view to two things. So exactly to the question that Robin asked. So how did different governments in different times, as you say, under different contexts try to still make the best of the situation by relying on the peanut, by giving out credit in this particular way, by setting particular production structures, and to what extent that fails. That could be one way. But I think so that there is identifiable differences and I alluded to that too with, for example, between Faye and Wade. So Wade was really, he wanted to get rid of the peanuts. So in his agricultural plans, it wasn't even mentioned. And now Sall says, because Chinese demand is so high, we should actually bank on the peanut even more. So there are identifiable differences and they try to pursue different strategies. But I think the results might possibly be not that different. That is my impression, empirical impression so far. Because as you say, they were really, I mean, they can choose different political approaches and they did. I mean, Senghor over his twenty-year rule, his main job I think was to sort of build a domestic business elite, which he partially achieved, also by strong links to the state sector obviously. How sustainable this kind of arrangement is is of course another question. So there is a lot of agency. But the most difficult question is I think why there is this difference, to what extent do they really produce lastingly different results in terms of social economic relations and the structure of the economy on the ground.

Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, thank you very much Kai Konenbrock for this very wonderful talk. I think time is up for us.

Narrator: This was On the Go: Sprint Factories and African Mobilities.

[music]

Speaker 1: Hello everyone, thank you for joining us today. We're going to discuss the upcoming quarterly review and go through some key performance indicators together.

Value Annotations

Origins & context

Generated by

Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct