PhD Research

It is now commonplace for French and British politicians to avoid references to spheres of influence and to talk instead of “Africa for the Africans” with organizations such as ECOWAS, African Union that European powers support financially in order to train African people for them to be able to be independent from European powers for any kind of issue. Yet how accurate is to say that France and the Britain have given up on their earlier policies of seeking influence south of the Sahara.

While this question is regularly asked in the literature to examine French and British approaches, particularly with reference to case study countries (Cameroon and Nigeria). This thesis will seek to plug this gap. Using a comparative perspective which will deal on the first hand with France and Cameroon and on the other hand with Britain and Nigeria and drawing on quantitative analysis of country-level data, in-depth interviews and an extensive review of the literature, this study will show briefly how France and the UK exerted a mixture of hard and soft power and influence over Cameroon and Nigeria over the colonial period and the early post-colonial decades with a special focus on the period post 1997 as it seems to symbolize the pivotal moment of shifting foreign policy towards Africa for both Britain and France-Though the thesis will focus on Britain and France , it will give pieces of information about Britain being big once in Cameroon and France being an increasingly important player in Nigeria- It will then demonstrate with reference particularly to, economic development and military policies how the French and British have moved much more squarely in the direction of soft power. It will look at how, despite a softening of the rhetoric and discourse, both European donor states have sought to find new ways of exerting influence and have endeavored to reinvent methods of power The thesis will not focus on the politico-cultural aspect of the power thought will enounce its characteristics and explain the reason why it is not mainly part of the study as mainly dealing with soft power. Finally it will explain these developments in terms of hard, soft, smart, power, realist and neoclassical realist theories and will analyze possible future developments in French and British policies towards Cameroon, Nigeria and Africa as a whole.

Teaching

30/09/10 Small group teaching
01/10/10 Introduction to assessment and feedback in teaching