POL S 335 B: Topics in Political Economy

Political Economy Topics:  "Data, Technology, and Development in Africa"

Course Description:

In the study of contemporary politics in Africa, scholars have increasingly confronted numerous paradoxes about the continent’s political, economic, and social development that belie any easy or agreed-upon answers across numerous social science disciplines.

Some of these puzzles include the following (all of which we address in this class): i) Considering that Europe and Africa had relatively similar levels of wealth and political organization as recently as the 15^th century CE, why did Europe enslave millions of Africans and colonize most of its territory rather than the other way around? ii) How is it that European colonization of Africa was done “on the cheap” and without the imposition of much colonial infrastructure, at the same time that colonization seems so destructive to modern African politics, markets, and culture? iii) Why is it that Africa is so rich in (natural and human) resources and endowments at the same time that its growth has fallen behind other regions? iv) Why does ethnic identity in Africa appear to limit territorial consolidation and economic growth, and galvanize domestic conflict, if scholars view social identities as mere “social constructs”? v) Why did democracy “suddenly” spread across Africa at the end of the Cold War if Africa supposedly had no history of democratic governance? vi) Why do African citizens routinely use elections to hold political leaders accountable at the same time elected officials often rig elections to stay in power? vii) Why do African societies seem more amenable to adoption of new information and communications technology (ICT) and digital media, and at lower levels of wealth, compared to other global regions? viii) Why has the global marketplace proved so open to adoption of “Afrofuturism” in the 21^st century when it rejected numerous aspects of African culture(s) in the 20^th century?

These puzzles, and a lack of scholarly consensus to resolve them, arise not just from disagreement over theoretical perspectives from African and Africanist scholarship over the last few decades; they also arise from a (previous) lack of systematic data collection, analysis, and synthesis from across the continent. This has produced different silos of knowledge that speak past each other. For example, historians and anthropologists often sufficiently characterize the political, economic, and social characteristics of certain places or time periods, but lack data from multiple places or time periods to evaluate claims systematically to draw comparative conclusions. Economic historians and political scientists often utilize comparative data from across African countries and time periods to broadly characterize the evolution of its states and markets, but then lack sufficient knowledge of specific times and places to convincingly demonstrate the validity of certain measures and concepts. Moreover, recent advances in archeology via remote sensing, historical data collection, digitized archives, survey research, ICT, and Artificial Intelligence are helping to produce new research that overturns many assumptions and conclusions social scientists have made about Africa.

In this class, we investigate these paradoxes, along with their theoretical, empirical, and methodological origins, by studying the development of African states, markets, and societies. To do so, we will rely on the scientific method, new data sources, data science, and what I term “cliometric historiography” (the use of long-run and systematic political, economic, and social data to interrogate claims made historically and contemporaneously about African development). We will use a variety of methods from data science, demography, ethnography, economic history, quantitative social science, and the emerging field of “technology for development” to bolster theoretical claims, test hypotheses, and synthesize empirical analyses to contribute new knowledge to many questions that bedevil previous scholarship.

The course will be organized longitudinally and thematically. After beginning with an Introduction and Scope of Inquiry, in Module 1 we will examine the pre-colonial to early modern period, or roughly pre-history to the 15^th century CE. In Module 2, we will look at European contact starting in the 15^th century to the colonial period, which ended in the mid 20^th century. In Module 3, we will look at the post-independence period after 1960 to the end of the Cold War, followed by the era of democratization and market growth (1989 to the present). We will end the course with Module 4, by looking at Afrofuturism and the global position of Africa in the 21^st century. In each module, we will examine specific questions, theories, and themes, but we will also critically examine the evidentiary standard by which social scientists have made claims about Africa’s development, including the data sources they leverage, the methods/processes by which they test hypotheses, and the validity of the conclusions they draw.