Adekeye Adebajo

Overview

​ Website URL: ipatc.joburg Professor Adekeye Adebajo is the former executive director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution (CCR) in Cape Town, South Africa, since 2003 and concluding in 2015. Previously, he had served on United Nations missions in South Africa, Western Sahara, and Iraq. He joined the University of Johannesburg as Director of the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation in 2015, where he subsequently led the formation of the Institute for Global African Affairs within the auspices of the University of Johannesburg and the University of West Indies. Research Involves: Professor Adebajo’s primary research focus has been conflict and peace-making in the African continent, on which he has produced numerous books and articles as well as conference proceedings. His wide scholarship, however, branches into other related areas such as the various foreign policies of African states (primarily Nigeria and South Africa), international institutions, political leadership, the African diaspora, intra-African relations, as well as the continent’s relations with the rest of the world, and in particular with the US and Europe. Professor Adebajo is the author of multiple books including Building Peace in West Africa (2002); Liberia's Civil War: Nigeria, ECOMOG, and Regional Security in West Africa (2002); The Curse of Berlin: Africa After the Cold War (2010), UN Peacekeeping in Africa: From the Suez Crisis to the Sudan Conflicts (2011), The Eagle and the Springbok: Essays on Nigeria and South Africa (2017) as well as the biography of former President Thabo Mbeki (2016) and most recently Foreign Policy in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Security, Diplomacy and Trade (2018). He is co-editor or editor of nine books. He offers courses on Conflict Resolution in Africa and on Pan-African Thought Leadership under the auspices of the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation within the Humanities Faculty. He also runs a column in Business Day and is a frequent contributor to The Guardian and The Guardian (Nigeria). Research Relevance: Professor Adebajo’s research touches on some of the African continent’s most pressing questions: including the stumbling blocks to its capacity for quelling conflicts in both civil and inter-state settings, enacting a sustainable continental integration scheme capable of adequately responding to the continent’s conflicts, and meeting its commercial demands. Professor Adebajo’s work also carries implications for the process of decolonisation within the higher education space in South African and African higher education. In 2018 the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation held a major conference on the decolonisation of the higher education sector, along with potential synergies with the African American studies programs in the US and others in the African diaspora (especially the West Indies).