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Newsletter International Institute for Advanced Studies

Tuesday August 21st 2007

Vol. 1

_______Inaugural Lecture______ "Slave Routes, Slave Roots and Nation-Building: Ghana, Ghanaians Abroad and the African Diaspora in the 21st Century." Africa is seen as the last frontier of development, a continent rich in natural resources and ready for external and internal investment. Programs such as the Millennium Development Goals seek to build the human potential of developing continents such as Africa, to ensure that the 21st century is an African one. As multinational corporations explore sites of production that give them competitive advantage, many reckon that it is only a matter of time before Africa becomes the focus of international investment. The proliferation of African transnational communities within Africa, Asia, Europe and North America underpins the building of capital and skills among transnational Africans, making them an important engine of growth for African economies. The overlap between African transnationals and the older African diaspora has forged extensive networks that can be deployed in the development of Africa. The intensification of globalization and the revolution in information technology have created expanded social imaginaries with shared aspirations and expectations around the world. The 21st century, in short, is an exciting time for Africa, and it is important that Africans seize the mantle and define the future of their continent. The Internet has bridged gaps of knowledge. Capital moves globally. “Best practices” are held up as models across the globe. Technology is being indigenized in innovative ways all around the world. The International Institute for Advanced Studies represents an opportunity to harmonize these possibilities and guide development in Africa in a distinctly African way. To bring history and culture to bear on contemporary issues, to adopt the longue durée perspective and underscore how history can sometimes be cyclical, to interrogate institutions past and present with an eye to institutional strengthening, reform and rehabilitation; these are the avenues, the possibilities that excite me about IIAS. Africans have been instrumental in building distinguished African studies programs in Africa and outside of Africa. The pendulum has swung to the West, and today the study of Africa thrives more in the West than in Africa. Indeed, Harvard University, perhaps, teaches more African languages than most African universities. It is time to encourage and site centers of academic excellence in Africa, to create loci where Africans and Africanists interact on equal and meaningful terms. We need to center African voices in the study of Africa again, to unite the expertise of Africans in Africa and Africans abroad, to correct the anomaly of Africa as the continent about which more “scientific” knowledge exists outside than within Africa. And for me, IIAS is an opportunity to do all this. Post Office Box Ct5734,Cantonments. Accra. Ghana. Tel: +233-21-501521,Fax: +233-21-70120560 / -232927 Email: [email protected] Website: www.interias.com

Emmanuel K. Akyeampong FGA Harvard College Professor and IIAS co-founder

I am privileged to have had a diverse experience in academia spanning 44 years as a student, researcher, professor and Head of African Studies at the University of Ghana. I have been even more privileged to have been involved in policymaking at different levels especially in the Judiciary, in the Chieftaincy institution and in religious bodies. My most exciting experiences are, however, in my forays into entrepreneurship-fishing, farming, trading. My long history of working with academics, who are over-worked and underpaid, and who have little research resources and with policymakers who have gathered a lot of practical policy level experiences that are not recorded and shared have partly crystallized into this institute. The challenges of academics; the frustrations of policymakers with limited opportunities to share their rich learning; and the daily struggles of the majority of Ghanaians and Africans to get through bureaucratic and administrative hurdles in order to make a living and grow their initiatives, enterprises and businesses have a commonality. The commonality is first that they

Professor Irene Odotei University of Ghana IIAS Founder

are all isolated and not interacting and secondly, they all need one another in order to change the institutional structures that work to all of their disadvantage. My interest in directing this Institute lies in the unique niche that my various academic and other interests have created. A niche where academia, policy making and entrepreneurship will deal with their imposed voicelessness, interact, be mutually reinforcing and flourish. The institute creates the space for this: a space where African and Africanist scholars and policymakers will discover, create, share and use knowledge for the advancement of the Continent. The institute will not be limited to Africa. It envisages linkages and partnerships with similar institutes on other continents in order to ensure that our experiences and knowledge resources will draw on the global and also have global reach and effect.

Ato Quayson, FGA Professor of English and Diaspora Studies, University of Toronto. IIAS co-founder

It has always been evident to me since childhood that the word "culture" has several complex ramifications. From the anthropological definitions of culture, to culture as a tool of political and economic management, to its deployment as a contested site for identity formation, culture has always held a special interest for me. For example as far back as I can remember I have been interested in urban myths and legends. Many of these have to do with the doings of the political classes, but it is only recently that I came to understand that the stories had certain repeated patterns that could be discerned elsewhere across the continent. Thus urban myths and legends are useful not just for entertainment, which is normally how they are circulated and understood, but as a fascinating way for understanding specific cultural matrices that straddle the divides between tradition and modernity, and the local in the global. For me then the IIAS will provide a lively venue for taking culture seriously in all its senses. More than that it will also offer a platform through which to explore larger issues of cultural and intellectual property rights, something which may start from the collection and glossing of our apparently innocent urban legends to the much more charged area of documenting our varied cultural symbols and artefacts. Ultimately my hope is to see the Institute as one of the best of its kind in Africa and the rest of the world, attracting like-minded scholars to engage seriously with the new cross-disciplinary intellectual agendas that will form the core of the Institute's efforts.

Growing up in rural Ghana, I encountered, not as an idea or a concept, but intimately and in their profound reality, the numerous challenges faced by human beings as they struggle to survive day to day. My work with a development office before my University studies and my time in law school illuminated for me, and for the very first time, the critical role of the law in setting normative standards, establishing and monitoring political systems, ensuring order, facilitating economic growth, ensure social progress and so on. Since law school, and in the context of my work as a practitioner with a Law and Development Organisation-the Legal Resources Centre-Ghana, and as a researcher and academic during graduate studies at Harvard and teaching law at the Law Faculty, University of Ghana, I have explored day-today the broad area of the multiple intersections of "Law" and "Development". I come to the Institute with a heavy and confused set of experiences in practising and teaching aspects of Law and Development, Human Rights and Institutionalism in order to find the space to reflect deeply on them and contribute to the literature on the ways in which institutions spawned by the law, or existing in spite of the law, evolve and operate and how historical institutionalism may hold deep answers to some of the policy and developmental questions that baffle us as a continent.

Dr. Raymond Atuguba University of Ghana IIAS Fellow

Many expect African economists to devote most of their time and resources to studying poverty and income distribution matters only, because they are perceived to be the biggest development challenges facing the region. Others expect African economists to research mostly in the areas of agriculture and industrialization, because that is where many want to see the most change. The result is that seldom does an academic economics researcher in Africa devote all of his or her time to only one set of issues, and that is characteristic of my own work and where it will go in future. I have devoted the last two decades to exploring a number of different issues that I have judged to be relevant at a particular point in time. While I spent quite a bit of my early research years working on the mobilization of domestic resources for financing development, with a strong emphasis on informal finance, I have since then moved on to look at the development experiences of East Asia and their relevance for Africa, as well as spent a bit of time on the implications of recent trends in globalization for African development. Studying the African growth experience has allowed me to explore more fully the economic history of the region, looking closely at the political economy of development. My more recent work looks at the conditions that will allow for shared growth in Africa. Now I am paying more attention to the household situation as we work for faster economic growth. In working with my colleagues at IIAS I am hoping to launch a platform for exploring these themes even further. It is my expectation that we will transcend the usual divisions of economics into macroeconomics and microeconomics. We should be focusing a lot more on the institutions that will allow macroeconomic policies to better reflect the conditions of micro entities. The interface between institutional development, policy re-orientation and individual benefits should be a major force behind our research and IIAS provides an environment for generating the needed collaboration to make this successful.

Dr. Ama de-Graft Aikins Social Psychology and Health University of Cambridge IIAS Fellow I am interested in the way everyday experiences of chronic physical and mental illnesses are shaped by the complex interplay between self, family, community and health institutions. How does the chronically ill individual cope with, or transcend, the physical, psychological and financial demands of long-term illness? Does the experience change their identity and roles in society? Do significant others understand the nature and implications of the illness and can they (or do they) provide support? Does the condition evoke stigma and in what ways is this experienced by both sufferers and significant others? What health systems does the chronically ill individual believe in and use and to what extent do these provide the right interventions for their condition? Do health policymakers and their development partners recognize the condition and do they allocate appropriate symbolic and material resources for it? These questions move understandings of chronic illness experience beyond the narrow biophysical confines of medical science into the realms of culture, history, religion, economics and politics. They underscore the need for a multifaceted - ie multidisciplinary - approach to designing both research and interventions. I envisage IIAS as a dynamic space where I can discuss ideas and develop long-term partnerships with historians, anthropologists, economists and legal experts who are intellectually and politically committed to Africa and Africans. By drawing on our respective areas of expertise we can develop robust research and interventions that are culturally, psychologically and economically appropriate, that fundamentally recognize the inseparable link between health and human development and that, crucially, reach communities in need.

Professor Ernest Aryeetey University of Ghana and ISSER IIAS Fellow Mr. William Baah Boateng University of Ghana IIAS Fellow I see culture and development as bed fellows. In simple terms, one could refer to culture as a way of life of a group of people. The inherent dynamism of culture makes it an important tool in analyzing developmental challenges of a country. Analysts and social commentators are often quick to compare the state of development of the Ghanaian economy with that of Malaysia and Singapore among others. However, they often ignore the cultural differences between these countries and Ghana.As a graduate student of Economics at the University of Ghana in the 1990s, I struggled to find answers to the question of why Africa and for that matter Ghana continues to lag behind other parts of the world in terms of development. During my study stay at Harvard, and through interactions with colleague from other parts of the world, I came to the realization that the state of development of any economy is influenced largely by the culture of the people and institutional arrangements of the country. The attitude of people at the work place and in their everyday lives is undoubtedly shaped by their culture. Many development policies in Africa have not worked as expected because we often ignore the importance of culture and history in shaping the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of systems or institutions. My association with the IIAS will provide me with a platform to work closely with seasoned scholars in History, Culture, Law, Psychology and Economics to understand and appreciate the developmental challenges of Ghana in particular and Africa in general beyond my specialized field of Economics. I look forward to seeing IIAS develop as one of the best institutes that will serve as home for serious researchminded scholars across disciplines.