Building Resilient States and Societies as Goal in the Joint Africa-EU Strategy : What’s the Problem Represented to be?

Abstract: This study concerns the problem representation behind the goal of building more resilient states and societies in EU-Africa policies. As resilience is a recent feature of the European Union’s policy discourse, the study aims at uncovering the problematisation behind its use towards Africa and, consequently, what interests lie behind this change of language. The study is conducted on documents pertaining the Joint Africa-EU Strategy and through the employment of the “What’s the problem represented to be?” (WPR) approach. Moreover, the research engages with a postcolonial standpoint through which the findings are discussed, highlighting concepts such as ‘othering’ and ‘eurocentrism’. The findings of this study indicate that the problematisation behind the goal of enhancing resilience in the African context is represented as a lack of African capacities to deal with different issues, and that the EU’s ‘need’ of a more resilient Africa relates to the increase of ownership in the African territory. The problem representation is argued to contribute to the colonial narrative that characterizes EU-Africa relations and therefore clashes with the emancipatory features that concrete ownership should entail.