Description
This paper provides a situated examination of two of the most influential theories of international relations in Africa – extraversion and gatekeeping (or the ‘gatekeeper state’). It provides a novel reading of these theories refracted through the study of two of the continent’s international airports – Bole International in Ethiopia and Kotoka International Ghana – each located in countries with very different historical patterns of international integration. It argues that despite these airports being quite literal gateways, mediating between each country and the outside world, and situated at the intersection of national and international economies, in neither country do the political and economic activities located around the airport vindicate either Bayart or Cooper’s theorisations of Africa’s international relations. Instead a rather more complex story emerges in which the two international ‘gates’ under study have not been used simply to sustain and benefit from adverse terms of international integration. Rather these ‘gates’ have, in different ways, been used to rewrite and remake each country’s place in the world and wider continent, at the same time as driving the redrawing of the map of its domestic territorial relations through the infrastructure they provide. Both factors, it is argued, have significant implications for Ethiopian and Ghanaian state-building efforts which run counter to the extraversion and gatekeeping hypotheses. It is for this reason that the paper proposes these airports as sites of gatemaking rather than gatekeeking – a framework which not only foregrounds the agency of African elites but also demonstrates how this agency has been used not simply to sustain – but instead to seek to challenge – Africa’s subordinate terms of international incorporation.
