Diplomatic Training and Spaces of Anticolonial Worldmaking

Abstract

Focusing on training for African diplomats from newly independent countries in Cameroon, Kenya, and Zimbabwe, this paper makes the case for spaces of diplomatic training as sites for anticolonial “worldmaking” (Getachew 2019; Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination). Recent scholarship has highlighted the value of African leaders’ visions but largely overlooked the actors, spaces, and practices through which these visions were to be enacted. Drawing on archival evidence from Africa, Europe, and North America, and oral history interviews, we argue that worldmaking projects were grounded, learnt, and transformed in places such as the classrooms and study tours we explore. Whilst many accounts of anticolonial and subaltern geopolitical projects focus on grassroots activism beyond and against the state, we argue we also need to attend to the contributions of those—like African diplomats in training—who critiqued Eurocentric and colonial international relations from subaltern positions whilst remaining privileged within the context of the postcolonial state.