This story has also been published on the EADI Blog

Denmark has a new strategy for engaging with Africa. In this blog follows some reflections on how we at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) collaborated with colleagues in African research institutions to turn the usual North-driven ”Policy Brief” on its head. Because who gets to influence development policy in European capitals? Who should influence development policy in European capitals? And should European capitals at all be making strategies and plans for Africa?

At DIIS in Copenhagen, we have an explicit mandate to inform (Danish) policy makers. As a public research institution, we’re expected to provide analyses and policy advice to the Danish government and its ministries on matters of security, foreign, and development policy. 

In 2023, the Danish Government decided that a new strategy for Denmark’s engagement with Africa was needed. The immediate pretext was a realization of  Africa  becoming of greater (geo)political importance to Denmark and Europe. But it was obviously also a want to follow the many other European countries who have adopted new ‘Africa strategies’ over the past year or so – Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Germany etc. 

At DIIS, discussions commenced on how we could best support the Danish MFA’s process around preparing the new strategy, as we had done so many times before. Some of us quickly raised an interest in opening up the platform provided by DIIS to some of our African research colleagues to contribute to the Danish strategy. Not least because of the somewhat oxymoronic nature of a situation in which Danish researchers advise a Danish ministry on a Danish plan for Africa. And because often, some people in our institutions have deeply held expectations about who can publish and who cannot – including communication departments and other administrative functions that have become used to certain precedence over time – and expectations on  products from an organization such as DIIS.

We approached a group of our African colleagues and asked them whether they would like to contribute their advice on how Denmark should reconsider its strategic engagement with Africa: Mary Boatemaa Setrana (University of Ghana), Rahma Hassan (University of Nairobi), Faisal Garba (University of Cape Town), Mohamed Aden Hassan (Rako Research and Communication Centre, Hargeisa, Somaliland), and Meron Zeleke Eresso (University of Addis Ababa). 

What was recommended and did the Government listen?

The result was a DIIS Policy Brief authored solely by our African colleagues. You can read the full Policy Brief here, The main recommendations were:

• Establish equal and transparent partnerships: Viable partnerships should be participatory and recognize African actors as capable agents.
• Engage with Denmark´s own role and legacy in Africa: Acknowledging previous lopsided relations while moving away from any current practice of colonial mentality.
• See opportunities instead of crisis: Recognizing Africa’s potential, focusing on the potential of natural resources, youth and migration.
• Commit to trust, localization, and institutional collaboration: Incorporating local knowledge and marginalized voices in developing policies as well as ensuring African representation in international bodies.

These recommendations were edited by us, the DIIS employees, after quite some deliberation of whether or not we should do so. The rest of the text, however, consists of long quotes that belong to each of our African colleagues on different topics selected by them. Quotes, because we wanted their words to be featured just as they were said, but also because we didn’t want to impose major time-consuming tasks of negotiating a collective text. 

Interestingly, and troublingly, when the publication made its way to SCOPUS and other indexes, we the Danes were suddenly credited as primary authors. We’re not sure exactly how or where in the administrative process this had happened (e.g. whether someone registering it simply saw as coming from DIIS an expected the Danish people mentioned to be primary authors), but we had to ask the different platforms to alter the information and make sure the right authors were credited. If anything, it shows the extent of systemic changes needed in efforts of decolonization, beyond research and into administrative and institutional concerns. 

Did the Danish government listen, you might ask? The short answer is that it may have listened, but what it heard was largely not reflected in the strategy. The strategy (which you can read here) positively revolves around the need for new equal partnerships and recognizes African actors as capable agents that must also be increasingly represented in international bodies. Yet it fails to reckon with Denmark’s colonial history, not devoting any attention to it, and we even heard politicians argue that Denmark has a special place vis-à-vis Africa because it was ‘never a colonizer’. This is, of course, patently not true. Denmark may never have colonized an entire African ‘country’, but its colonial and mercantile rule of the ‘Gold Coast’ in the Gulf of Guinea (now Ghana) was a central hub for the slave trade (including to another colony, the West Indies, where Denmark was a colonial ruler for 250 years). It is estimated that 110,000 enslaved people were transported on Danish ships across the Atlantic from the 1660s to 1803. To our African colleagues, the strategy could only work as a steppingstone for a new and differently honest and equal conversation, if it reckoned with Denmark’s past. It did not. 

Further, whilst our African colleagues stressed the need to see opportunities instead of crisis on questions of migration and youth, the strategy maintains a need to ‘fix’ (i.e. stop) irregular migration. There is some talk of exchanges of students and the needs of a future Danish labor market, but the reality remains a government that problematizes migration and connects it to both ‘dangerous’ youth unemployment and ‘climate refugees’. 

These overall considerations and conclusions obviously leave us with a set of thoughts about how to do this in the future, and how others might go about it. 

Open reflections about the initiative and some potential takeaways

A first reflection is the extent to which we may in fact be cementing DIIS’ central position in these endeavors, i.e. reproducing the unequal power relations that led us to consider this initiative in the first place? Positioning DIIS centrally in these discussions by pushing a more decolonized approach to policy advice and mobilizing a set of tools that may enable the broader process of awareness raising perhaps doesn’t do much in terms of getting the Danish MFA to engage with African institutions in the first place. 

A second reflection pertains to what exactly we are legitimizing by actively engaging in these policy discussions. Does it at all make sense for Denmark to have a strategy for Africa, is a question we posed ourselves many times along the effort – does a truly decolonized approach not imply a rejection to support such a strategy? Are we enabling or reproducing this kind of thinking by taking it for granted that we should inform and support the policy process? 

By mobilizing our African colleagues, we also help bolster and legitimize the strategy and the process surrounding it, allowing policy makers and the government to act as if the strategy were grounded in equal discussions with African stakeholders. Stakeholders who, as we saw, may have been listened to but, without being followed by the appropriate action. 

From the side of research and collegiality, we may also consider to what extent we are outsourcing risks here? Among some of our African colleagues, there was indeed an attitude of ‘why should we help Denmark prepare a strategy we don’t think should be made in the first place’.

In the end, of course, it’s that damning question of whether it is good enough to start somewhere and hopefully progress from there, or whether small changes serve mostly as reproduction, not as transformation, and perhaps even to undermine the potential for anything transformative to happen. Would we advise other European research institutions to try and do the same? Absolutely. Would we advise them to do more than we did? Absolutely. As an ending, here are some of the key concerns that this initiative passes on to others who may want to pursue something similar, including some that we only considered too late: 

• Consider the platform your institution may provide to ensure other voices are given the room to speak. Also, if it breaks with how you ‘normally do things’ (as some resisting it may argue). Maybe especially if it breaks with how you ‘normally do things’.
• Ask yourself why, for what, and for whom you are really doing this? Be sure not to simply outsource risks or help legitimize processes that do not deserve to be legitimized.
• Be strategic about the plethora of communication instruments that are available to you, and don’t be afraid to confront policy makers with more direct forms of engagement than what is usually found in a passive, ‘dead’, policy brief.
• Continuously search for the next step – how could we take this a step further to foster something that is more transformative?
• Try to make sure your efforts are not a one-off in a moment of decolonized clarity – how can we change the institutional status quo to bring the politics of knowledge to the center of all the things we do?

Adam Moe Fejerskov is Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute of International Studies (DIIS). Fejerskov studies the terrains and ramifications of contemporary global inequalities. His newest books are Good Will Corrupting (2025, MIT Press), The Global Lab (2022, Oxford UP)

Mikkel Funder is Senior Researcher at DIIS. Funder studies the social and political dimensions of climate change, natural resources and environmental governance in the Global South.

Nauja Kleist isSenior Researcher at DIIS. Kleist’s research focuses on the linkages between mobility, belonging and social order. She analyses how migration is perceived, practiced and governed by different actors, the role of mobility in society, and the transnational engagement of diaspora groups with a focus on gender and affect.