Getting started
IRIC director Adamou Ndam Njoya at his desk, c.1972 (Source: IHEID Archive)
Adamou Ndam Njoya, born in French-controlled mandate Cameroon, trained in diplomacy and international relations in Paris at the Institut International d’Administration Publique (IIAP) shortly after independence in the 1960s. He was there along with other young men and women from across France’s former colonies destined to serve in their new states’ public administrations, learning in the same school that for over a century prior had prepared French colonial administrators for their overseas postings. Following this, he completed placements at the French Embassy in London and the UN in Geneva in preparation for service in the Cameroon’s diplomatic service. In 1972, shortly after his return to Cameroon, he became the founding director of the Institut des Relations Internationales du Cameroun (IRIC), partly financed by the same Carnegie Endowment for International Peace that had funded diplomatic training for African students in Geneva’s Graduate Institute. IRIC in turn trained hundreds of diplomats from across Africa over the next forty years.
The spatial dynamics of such transnational diplomatic training for postcolonial states lie at the crossroads of a number of different fields of study - including political geography, diplomacy studies, education studies and postcolonial and African history - yet none of these fields has yet considered it as a topic of serious consideration in its own right. In this project we ask: how might an interdisciplinary approach to diplomatic training broaden understandings of postcolonial state-building as a transnational project? In particular we are interested in how spaces and practices of training shaped diplomatic norms, networks and exclusions and, in turn, what this might tell us about international support for emerging states, and the geopolitics of giving and receiving training.
As we progress in this research project, this blog series will offer brief updates and insights into our progress, elucidating more about the spaces and practices of diplomatic training in the process of decolonisation through stories like Njoya’s. Like milestones along the road, they will help situate the progress of the project – though as to where the road leads we have only an intended direction. Our first steps will be to survey the available archival records in order to map the field of diplomatic training in our period, the period of formal decolonisation in Africa. This will take us to various sites across Europe, North America, and Africa – starting with Geneva (Institut des Hautes Etudes Internationales et du Développement and UNITAR), Paris (IIAP) and Oxford (Foreign Service Program). Inspired by the example of the Afro-Asian Collective, we intend to organise this information within an interactive web-map that will trace the locations, interconnections, and movements of institutions and individuals involved in training the diplomats of postcolonial African states. Alongside this archival data collection, we are keen to hear about the lived experiences of diplomatic training from former trainers and trainees themselves, to develop an oral history better able to account for the affective, everyday aspects of such training.
If you fit that description and would like to get in touch with the project team, please send us an email.