Great Lakes Journal of Strategic African Studies (GLJSAS) is an interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary journal that addresses crosscutting issues of strategic significance for Africa, with special focus on (but not limited to) the Great Lakes region and the Horn of Africa.  These two regions are of great geopolitical significance, much as they are also home to some of the most complex political and ethnic conflicts the world has experienced.  

The so-called middle class appears to be a “muddling class”. Rigorously explored differentiation remains largely absent – not to mention any substantial class analysis. Fortunately, though, the debate has created sufficient awareness among scholars to explore the fact and fiction of the assumed transformative power of a middle class.

African Studies remains a colonised space. While the early writings about Africa are based on colonial expeditions, missionary exploits and anthropological ethnographies, contemporary scholarship is dominated by non-Africans who have positioned themselves as the authoritative voices in a 21^st century scramble for influence, as if Africa has no intellectuals or knowledge production of its own.

The project of genuinely decolonizing the university must be part of an inclusive task to transform the wider society of which the academy is an integral part. It is a long term undertaking which surely starts with the audacity to name the elephant in the room: white supremacy.