Beyond the “North - South”: New territorialities between Africa and Asia

Over the last two decades, relations between Africa and Asia have been increasing, starting with the significant increase of trade between the two regions and the investments of Asian countries across the African continent. Economic relations play an important role. But there are many other factors to these new African-Asian relations. Social, political and cultural interactions continue to increase between the two continents, the trend being encouraged by globalization.

The purpose of this workshop is to study the new socio-political, economic and cultural exchanges that extend across the two continents, based on geopolitical, macro or micro-economic, sociological or ethnographic approaches. To analyze these new relationships across a wide perspective, the question of the historical relations between the two continents should also be argued: for example, the relations during the pre-colonial period, colonial times and during the Cold War...

That leads to a reassessment of the new methods and frameworks on social sciences that face these phenomena which transform these two territories (Africa and Asia), with or without passing through countries of the global north. How do these new Africa-Asia relations change the paradigms of social sciences? How could we review, deconstruct or reconstruct today the epistemological and methodological approaches developed through centuries of legacy of African and Asian studies in Europe, established in the colonial and postcolonial contexts?

This reflection allows us to open different perspectives, shifting our view from the “center” (Europe, America...) to the “peripheries” (Asia, Africa...) and, through this approach, trying to go beyond the division and opposition between center and periphery, North and South.

PROGRAM