Insecurity related to acts of terrorism and radicalisation are high on the political and social agendas of our world today. In this paper we try to understand how these concerns affect academic knowledge production, and vice versa.
As Africanists our main regions of research are situated in West and Central Africa. The past years the representation of security on maps has become one of the measures to define accessibility of an area for research. Behind these coloured maps are protocols to be filled out, ministry advices, etc. We were confronted with these new geographies of security- ordering when we planned research in CAR, Chad and Mali, and when we organised a conference in N’djamena and in Bangui. In all cases we had to go through bureaucracies of our University, and Embassies.
In this paper we first explore study the ideas and imaginaries behind the creation of coloured maps on insecurity in our world. Maps from different institutions vary in colours, and European countries have turned back to green after terrorist attacks, whereas attack threats have not really changed. On the other side of the world the colours have changed from yellow to almost permanent orange and red. We will ‘read’ the maps through a critical discourse analysis model and questions the processes of ordering and othering at play. Second, we are concerned with the question how academia and its bureaucracy engage with these colours and how the colours changes their practices? To answer these questions we use an ethnographic approach to analyse our own experiences in navigating university policies and we interview decision makers. Finally we will explore how these practices of geographical ordering (and othering?) influence knowledge production in area studies, African studies and in general.