Abstracts Law

Neoliberalising Africa: Revealing Technologies of Government in the New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad)

by Luke Andrews

This thesis investigates the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) in order to engage debates about neoliberalism in African development policy. In identifying limitations with commentaries of Nepad and pervasive narratives of neoliberalisation, I employ an analytic of governmentality to reinterpret neoliberalisation as the governmental re-management of populations into societies of free, entrepreneurial, self-regulating subjects. Firstly, I investigate how Nepad makes Africa knowable and amenable to technical intervention in the form of “development”, particularly drawing attention to how the African subject is understood and the intimacy between technical solutions and expert diagnosis. Secondly, I explore four initiatives and techniques that attempt to render these rationalities reality. The conclusions elucidate how neoliberalism ought not to be understood as a monolithic, unrolling totality that simply implants itself through coercive power relations, but rather is comprised of a patchwork of rationalities, knowledges and discourses and given effect through prosaic governing practices.