Susann Baller - MIASA - Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa

Susann Baller is historian and researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch Berlin. From 2021 to 2023, she was Director of the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA), and from 2017-2020 she directed the Transnational Research Group “The Bureaucratisation of African Societies” in Dakar, sponsored by the Max Weber Foundation. Based in Accra and Dakar throughout this period, she was employed as a researcher by the German Historical Institute Paris. Prior to this, Susann Baller was a researcher and lecturer at the Humboldt University in Berlin and at the University of Basel as well as a fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation at the Institut des mondes africaines (IMAF) in Paris and at the University of Michigan as well as a fellow at the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies. Specialised in African history, she completed her dissertation at the Humboldt University in Berlin (published under the title “Spielfelder der Stadt: Fußball und Jugendpolitik seit 1950” [Playing Fields of the City: Football and Youth Politics in Senegal since 1950], 2010). Her habilitation project deals with the topic of “Travelling Politicians: Power and its Representation in West Africa during Decolonisation, 1945-62”. In addition to the fields of urban, sports and youth history and decolonisation in West Africa, she has also worked on the topics of bureaucratisation, knowledge production and scientific cooperation.

MIASA Project: Unwrapping ‘sustainable governance’: Reflections about a concept which is not one

This project reflects about MIASA’s main topic of ‘sustainable governance’ by taking a non-normative approach and considering research outcomes of MIASA fellows and alumni. The concept is widely used in politics and academic literature, though with various meanings and interpretations. It is deeply rooted in United Nations development language and can at best be characterized as something between a “promise” and a “claim-making concept”. Some call it a “policy artefact” (Pieterse 2008: 32) which pretends to explain the world, but obscures its complexities. This project asks when and how MIASA fellows and alumni have endorsed, avoided or rejected the term, collecting and interconnecting different voices. It thereby asks to what extend ‘sustainable governance’ can be considered as a concept and what does it mean to employ this in research on the African continent. Moreover, it explores how research at MIASA has contributed to a more nuanced understanding of the semantic field of ‘sustainability’ and ‘governance’, and it raises the question what it has meant for the debate to have such an institute at the University of Ghana’s Legon campus. And finally, it reflects on how the use and non-use of ‘sustainable governance’ as a concept is shaped and informed by the ways how global knowledge production works.

Personal website

Institute:
Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin

Year:
2025/2026