Thinking the World from Africa: Why Geopolitics Must Change Its Perspective

Changing the point of departure

Geopolitics often presents itself as a science of power relations, territories, borders and state strategies. Yet behind this apparent neutrality it remains largely constructed from European and North Atlantic historical experiences that were progressively elevated into universal norms.

This observation is the starting point of my book Thinking the World from Africa: Towards a Relational Geopolitics. Thinking from Africa does not mean adding a regional case to an already established discipline, nor merely demanding symbolic recognition for a long-marginalised continent. It means questioning the very categories of geopolitics from a place where their limits appear with particular clarity.

Africa: an object of practice, a subject of theory

Africa occupies a paradoxical position in the world order. It is omnipresent in geopolitical practice—proxy wars, military interventions, humanitarian mechanisms, extractive economies, international norms and the externalisation of migration policies—yet it remains largely absent as a theoretical subject.

It is thought about, described, administered, securitised and evaluated, but rarely recognised as a place from which the world can be understood.

A revealing experience

Far from amounting to failure or backwardness, Africa’s geopolitical experience makes visible profound transformations in contemporary power: fragmented sovereignties, diffuse undeclared wars, governance through emergency, normative domination, externalised violence and diluted political responsibility.

These phenomena, long observed in Africa, can no longer be treated as anomalies peculiar to the continent. On the contrary, they are structural features of a rapidly changing world order.

Towards a relational geopolitics

The book’s central hypothesis is that what Africa reveals is not the world’s periphery but an advanced indicator of its contemporary logics. Africa helps us understand how power is now exercised globally: less through direct territorial control than through the differentiated management of dependencies, risks, movements and vulnerabilities.

The book therefore proposes moving from a territory-centred geopolitics to a relational geopolitics attentive to networks, flows, environments, structural dependencies and regimes of fragmented sovereignty.

This does not mean denying the state or power, but refusing to make them absolute. It means grasping power where it actually operates: in the lasting asymmetrical relationships that organise the contemporary world. Thinking from Africa is therefore not an identity-based retreat, but a theoretical shift.

Reference

Antoine Nguidjol, Thinking the World from Africa: Towards a Relational Geopolitics, Éditions Éclats du Verbe, 2026, ISBN 9798247081838. Available on Amazon.