ABSTRACT
Studying Africa-European Union (EU) relations as ‘EU-Africa Relations’ is now an established subfield, particularly within studies on EU foreign policy. While recent years has seen the expansion in practice of Africa-EU relations outside of its traditional focus on development assistance and trade to new areas of cooperation such as science and technology and gender equality, among others, the former continues to dominate how one understand the relationship. This chapter contextualises how Africa-EU relations has been theorised. It focuses on International Studies and shows how this has helped them conceptualise African agency. In recent years, the literature has caught up such that African perspectives can inform some theorising of Africa-EU relations. The development of comparative regionalism, especially, has facilitated this attention to the African side of the story. The normative turn in regionalism and the empirical changes in regionalism in the Global South (especially Africa and Latin America) have created the space for Africa’s visibility in regional integration discourses.
