Africa’s persistent wars, health epidemics and hunger crises have in recent years continued to supply world public opinion with a gloomy picture of the continent. Scholarly approaches have done little to assuage this image. On the contrary, they have provided diagnoses which largely echo the international media’s doom and gloom.

Such diagnoses are based on a one-sided perspective on African politics and the social processes that underpin it. They focus on the exclusion of particular actors – be they individual or social – from political participation but ignore to a large extent the social spaces that these actors often successfully create through their agency. Processes of political emancipation in Africa are, though, much more frequent than assumed. They depend on other, non-western norms and values and in particular on the transformative power of everyday practices of individual as well as social creativity. Scholars who work with the usual conceptual frameworks frequently overlook these emerging social spaces because they are related to another social and political order that the outside observer is not familiar with and that is only incompletely conceptualized in the social sciences. A social analysis based on the experience of Western history thus leads to a partial if not inaccurate interpretation of such processes. Theoretical attempts such as neo-patrimonialism illustrate the efforts to overcome the shortcomings of classical social and political concepts.

We believe that an appropriate understanding of the present socio-political transformation in Africa requires a radical re-thinking of basic concepts and theories. We also believe that the common perception of African citizens as victims of their political leaders neither does justice to the creativity that emerges in many unforeseen places and situations nor to the fact that political actors always have to cope with this agency – even if they would intend to build their domination on mere coercion.

The agency of social actors and the societal creativity that it can lead to opens spaces of freedom and political emancipation. Such processes relate to the formation of novel social and political orders that include many more fields than just domination and resistance. Both the creative formation of such spaces of emancipation and the novel orders that they may generate have not received the same attention as the politics of belonging and exclusion.

The intention of this conference is thus to foster an empirically based and theoretically informed discussion about creativity and political emancipation in Africa. It adopts a comparative perspective and invites scholars interested in the theme and its theoretical challenges and working on Africa or on other parts of the world to address one or several of the following questions:

• What processes of political emancipation exist and how do they differ from each other?
• How should an appropriate typology of such processes look like?
• What are the factors that underpin such processes?
• How do they relate to individual and social agency?
• How does the agency of actors lead to social creativity?
• How do such processes affect states and statehood?
• What are appropriate conceptualisations of such processes and what do they mean for the theory of social and political order?

Partial to full travel support will be available for those selected to present papers, in particular those applying from Africa. A number of selected papers will be published in a book. The authors will be invited to participate in a follow-up workshop in autumn 2011.