Toni Haastrup is Professor and Chair in Global Politics at the University of Manchester. She holds a PhD in Politics from the University of Edinburgh, and her current research encompasses a wide range of themes, with special interests in Africa’s International Relations and critical feminist approaches to international relations.
Abstract:
Drawing on research on Africa's international relations, the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, and Africa-EU relations, Toni Haastrup argues that African agency in the current moment is neither passive adaptation nor simple defiance. It is something more complex: a strategic, contested, and often gendered negotiation with a multipolar world that still runs on extractive logics.
The contribution is organised around three interlocking arguments. First, multipolarity offers African states new leverage, but leverage alone does not constitute agency; genuine agency requires the capacity to set terms, not merely to play actors against one another. Second, the dominant responses to insecurity on the continent - from military coups to securitised partnerships with external powers – often replicate rather than disrupt the colonial architecture of control, making demilitarisation an urgent pan-African imperative. Third, true African agency cannot be built on patriarchal foundations. A feminist pan-Africanism – one that centres solidarity, care, and the knowledge and labour of those long excluded from state-centric politics – is a necessary condition of African sovereignty.
Overall, Toni Haastrup wants to interrogate what it would mean to take African agency seriously in practice – in regional institutions, policy frameworks and relationships with other actors. She concludes by suggesting that the most transformative political imaginaries emerging on the continent are already there – in feminist movements.
This lecture is part of the 2026 ALMA Lecture Series titled 'Global Ruptures or New Beginnings? Southern Perspectives on World Politics'. The ALMA (Africa, Latin America, Middle East and Asia) Lecture series is a series organised by the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute at the University of Freiburg in cooperation with the Colloquium Politicum addressing theoretical, empirical and methodological questions from a Global South perspective. This year’s lecture series is co-organised with the De/Coloniality Now Initiative of the University of Freiburg. This multidisciplinary initiative seeks to understand the impact of coloniality on today’s world and the ways in which people and institutions in all regions of the world, including our own, remember, perpetuate, and contest the legacy of colonialism with a focus on the present day (“now”).
