Professor Yates Invited by US Government to Share his Academic Expertise on African Politics

Professor Douglas Yates was invited by the United States government to present his research at the Africa "Board of Experts" Conference, 21-22 May, 2018, in McLean, Virginia, outside of Washington D.C .

The Africa Board of Experts Conference is an annual event bringing together intelligence specialists with think tanks experts and university scholars in order to share academic expertise with federal government analysts working on African affairs in the diplomatic corps, defense department, and intelligence community. Other academic experts participating in the event included Nicolas Van de Walle from Cornell University, Ambassador David Shinn from George Washington University, Nic Cheeseman from the University of Birmingham, and Leo Arriola from UC Berkeley, among others.

The main themes of this year's gathering were the alarming decline of democracy across the African continent, the ongoing armed conflicts in the Horn of Africa, the effects of the emerging China-Africa relationship, the promotion of economic development in Africa through trade, and the direction of US African policy under the current administration.

Yates, who teaches contemporary African politics at AGS, presented his research on France’s political, economic, and security influence in Francophone Africa. Yates has authored numerous publications on this topic. Among the most recent this year are two chapters in edited volumes : “France and Africa,” in Dawn Nagar and Charles Mutasa, eds. Africa and the World: Bilateral and Multilateral International Diplomacy (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), “French Military Interventions in Africa,” in Tony Karbo and Kudrat Virk, eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Peacebuilding in Africa (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2018), as well as an article in the International Journal of Political Economy: "Paradoxes of Predation in Francophone Africa" (vol. 48, no. 2 [2018]).

In his work on the topic, Yates shows that, despite denials by French scholars that France continues to play a dominant role in its former African colonial empire, there is a continuation of its military, economic, and political predominance. Yet he demonstrates a paradox in the French African policy, in that France is both too strong and too weak in its former empire.