CRG Book Launch 16: Surrounded: Democracy, Free Markets, and Other Entrapments of New Colonialism
Date: March 25, 2025 (Tue)
Time: 11:00–12:30
Location: 3rd Floor, John Vincke, Technicum 1, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 41, UFO Campus, Ghent University.
Surrounded is an ethnography of new colonialism. Putting together a series of articles written over a period of four years, this book touches on the informal, ignorable, subtle and seemingly benevolent ways through which new colonialism has encircled the continent – in technical, and powerfully depoliticized ways where even victims has been conscripted to the regime of own exploitation. Unlike colonialism of the past, this new manifestation – beginning in the period after the collapse of the USSR – has been tactfully depoliticised, and informalized. International institutions such as the WB, IMF, WWF, USAID; private ones such as banks, mining giants, telecoms, and many others have surrounded the African continent. Riding on abstract, supposedly noble notions such as free markets and democracy, human rights and development, they have captured and distracted the African intelligentsia, thereby ruining entire populations. They aren’t afraid of resorting to deadly violence in the name of protecting the values and ideals they supposedly stand for.
About the author
Yusuf Serunkuma is a scholar and essayist based at Makerere University in Kampala, and columnist with The Observer newspaper in Uganda. Yusuf has a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, and studies among other things, nationalist sentiments, popular culture, knowledge production and Critical Colonial Studies. Serunkuma is also a playwright, and his plays The Snake Farmers (2014) and The Meat Festivals (2025) are set-books in Ugandan and Rwandan secondary schools. Yusuf’s writings often appear in Review of African Political Economy (Roape.net), The Elephant in Kenya, and Pan-African Review in Rwanda. Serunkuma is also currently a postdoctoral fellow at KU Leuven.
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