Radicalism, relevance and the future of ROAPE

ROAPE was established at a time when critical scholarship on Africa was rare. Most Africanist journals bore the marks of their colonial origins in that they were generalist and highly empirical. In contrast, ROAPE was set up to provide a radical forum for politically engaged scholars who explicitly challenged neo-colonialism in its various guises, especially the pervasive (and continuing) tendency to privilege the voices of European scholars over those of Africans living and working on the continent. &break;Among the questions raised by the Editors of ROAPE who have called for this debate was the following: Is there a place for an area-focused political economy journal given the tendencies towards globalisation and neoliberalism?