Dr Adekeye Adebajo joins UNU Rector David M. Malone for a conversation assessing the African continent’s key post-cold war challenges in the areas of security, hegemony and unity. From the perspective of Dr Adebajo’s ambitious book, The Curse of Berlin: Africa After the Cold War, the conversation examines how historical and structural events continue to affect and shape Africa’s contemporary international relations, and its quest for peace and for sustainable development.
The Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 effectively set the rules for establishing European colonial borders across Africa. Disregarding Africa’s pre-existing cultural and linguistic boundaries, the resulting ‘Scramble for Africa’ launched Europe’s aggressive exploitation of Africa’s natural and human resources. Since regaining independence in the late 1950s and 1960s, Africa has continued to grapple with the ‘Curse of Berlin’ - a colonial legacy of sociopolitical fragmentation.
About the Speaker
Dr Adekeye Adebajo, one of Africa’s foremost scholars of war and peace in the continent, and doubtless the youngest among these, has been Executive Director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution in Cape Town, South Africa since 2003. He served as Director of the Africa Programme of the New York-based International Peace Academy between 2000 and 2003. During the same period, Dr Adebajo was an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs in New York. He has served on United Nations missions in South Africa, Western Sahara, and Iraq. He is the author of four widely praised books and the editor or co-editor of eight. He obtained his doctorate from Oxford University in England, UK, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He is a Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg.
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