CRG Book Launch 16: Surrounded: Democracy, Free Markets, and Other Entrapments of New Colonialism
Date: March 25, 2025 (Tue)
Time: 11:00–12:30
Location: 3rd Floor, John Vincke, Technicum 1, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 41, UFO Campus, Ghent University
Surrounded is an ethnography of new colonialism. Putting together a series of articles written over a period of four years, this book touches on the informal, ignorable, subtle and seemingly benevolent ways through which new colonialism has encircled the continent – in technical, and powerfully depoliticized ways where even victims has been conscripted to the regime of own exploitation. Unlike colonialism of the past, this new manifestation – beginning in the period after the collapse of the USSR – has been tactfully depoliticised, and informalized. International institutions such as the WB, IMF, WWF, USAID; private ones such as banks, mining giants, telecoms, and many others have surrounded the African continent.
Riding on abstract, supposedly noble notions such as free markets and democracy, human rights and development, they have captured and distracted the African intelligentsia, thereby ruining entire populations. They aren’t afraid of resorting to deadly violence in the name of protecting the values and ideals they supposedly stand for.