ABSTRACT
When scholars take the time to reflect on regionalism on the African continent, they usually consider it primitive, weak or simply a ‘failure’ (Asante 1997; Mistry 2003). A closely related misunderstanding is that African regionalism is considered of little relevance for comparative regionalism, which is illustrated by the fact that the African case is frequently excluded from such literature (Mansfield and Milner 1997; Mattli 1999) These weaknesses reflect the general marginalization of ‘Africa’ in academic research on the one hand and the overwhelming dominance of Eurocentric theories in the study of regionalism on the other.
