Asian Studies in Africa

Dates: 9-11 November 2012

Organized by:
International Institute for Asian Studies, The South-South Exchange Programme for Research on the History of Development and the University of Zambia

With support from:
The Social Science Research Council and the Southeast Asian Studies Regional Exchange Programme

Roundtable objective

The objective of this roundtable is to develop a programme that is in line with the goals as outlined below. Each session is centred on a relevant topic to this development, and all participants will participate fully in each panel. Panels Chairs will manage the panels through relevant questions and the guidance of discussion, and each Chair will use the notes compiled by the Co-Chair to present a summary of the panel at the end of each day. These notes will be compiled to create a report of the Asian Studies in Africa Roundtable, which will guide the development of future programmes and be used to solicit funding.

The Asian Studies in Africa initiative

The University of Zambia (UNZA), together with the International Institute of Asian Studies (IIAS) at Leiden University, The Netherlands, and the South South Exchange Programme for Research on the History of Development (SEPHIS), at the Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, plan to initiate a triangular transcontinental higher education capacity building program entitled Asian Studies in Africa involving partners in Africa, Asia and Europe.

UNZA, SEPHIS and IIAS are proposing to build educational capacities in the field of Asian Studies in a number of second and third-tier selected African centers of higher education, through the training of faculty and university administrators, and through curriculum and library development.

The rationale behind this initiative lies in the realization that, though the countries and peoples of Africa and Asia have been, over the last two centuries, intimately connected through circuits of trade, socio-cultural exchanges as well as through long-term settlement of communities, the present forms of intensive relationships of capital investments, commerce, political alliances and cultural transfers of knowledge, urgently call for systematic scholarly engagements with the past and present of Asian and African realities.

Informed by years of experience in Asia and Africa, the initiative also recognizes the need to strengthen a solid and critical infrastructure of social science knowledge dissemination and research, of which a focus on Asian Studies within African institutions is a part.

We believe that the development of institutional academic infrastructures capable of delivering foundational knowledge in the humanities and social sciences is an essential prerequisite for sustained socio-economic progress in African societies. We also think that access to knowledge of a world region as culturally diverse and economically powerful as Asia is what will enable countries and citizens of Africa to embrace this new South-South inter-continental relation to its full potentials. In that, we also believe that Europe and European institutions can play a positive role as facilitator and “relay” of a new, triangular, trans-regional configuration.

The objective of the ASA initiative to foster an autonomous Asia-focus African academic community that is able to train a critical mass of local experts on Asia and relationships to Asia. Once enabled, we believe the ASA initiative should constitute the kind of institutional and human infrastructure building undertaking that will be positively leveraged by Asia-led bilateral cooperation. It is the absence of this essential infrastructure in African universities that on the other hand may the cause for a structural new ‘hegemonic’ imbalance at the expenses of Africa.