The Abuja School of
Social and Political Thought
Mon - Fri 8am - 6pm Sat - Sun closed
+234 (0) 81 391 10901
Welcome to The Abuja School
About Us
The Abuja School
The Abuja School of Social and Political Thought (The Abuja School) is a forum of scholars, public intellectuals, policy experts and development enthusiasts and generally, ideas men and women, committed to the rediscovery of the rigorous reflective life in the classical Socratic sense. The common thread that run through our intellection is the common belief in the power of good ideas to help create a better future. Members of Abuja School believe that a sound idea is the most practical solution. We believe that Africa’s predicament is largely a result of the lack of systematic and sustained production of social knowledge. Even if we are gifted with ethical and focused leadership, we may not solve some of the most critical problems because we don’t have in our contemporary societies enough of the institutions and social norms that enable the production of the cutting-edge ideas and policies that reverse the grave decline in social and economic wellbeing in Africa.
The Abuja School is a non-partisan or sectarian intellectual hub. We are thinkers, scholars and activists who seek answers to today challenges by rethinking yesterday’s thoughts through the lens of today’s experience. We aim to go beyond the orthodoxy in seeking out new ideas for today. Looking at the intellectual landscape of global society we feel strongly that the leading ideas, conceptions, and ideologies dominant in the western world have run their course. They are exhausted. The world is looking for something new. And we believe that the new intellectual lens for the new world could (and should) come from Africa. So, the ambition of the Abuja School is to be the producer of the next transformative ideas for the present and next eras.
Abuja School is not a conventional school. It is a thinking and researching group. Our activities will consist mostly of ideas and policy sessions, occasion papers publications and policy briefings. We are not a public policy advocacy or implementation group. Whereas we will keep our intellectual feet on the ground, we are not engaged in conventional policy formulation. We are a school of intellectuals focused on promoting radical ideas that policy centers can pick up and convert to implementation polices. While being pragmatic in our prescriptions, we will be basically ideological and philosophic in our formulations. Our ambit is political, economic, and social ideas for prosperity, social stability, and human development. We want to create a new world with much more creative and inspired ideas.
The Abuja School holds ideas sessions, policy roundtables and conferences, and publishes books, mimeographs, and periodicals from time to time.
Our ambit is political, economic, and social ideas for prosperity, social stability, and human development.
Program Areas
Abuja school takes special interest in the question of democracy and politics in Africa. As we witness the crisis of democracy globally and the grave threat to stability and civic peace posed by its collapse in many parts of Africa, there is need to rethink the assumptions and fundamentals of democracy and the institutions of democratic governance in the region. The school studies the problematic sociopolitical effects of the management of democratic politics, and how the administration of elections has hindered or facilitated nation building, democratization and enthroned, in some situations, illiberal democracy.
The school periodically brings together intellectuals and bureaucrats to engage in rigorous reviews and analyses of electoral democracy and political governance in Africa.
At the center of governance failure in Africa and across much of the world is the role and rule of law. Law has shaped, for good and bad, the evolution of the state order and the institutions of production and distribution that determine social and economic wellbeing. The rule of law has been promoted largely as a supplement to the coordinates of free market economy. The limitation of the rule of law to the institutional orderings of the dominant model of capitalist economy underserves economic and social development, especially in the developing world.
The schools engages in disruptive discourses that transform the concept of law, rediscover the primary of the role law over the rule of law, and utilizes the insights of a retheorized concept of the role and rule of law to institutionalize policies that produce prosperity, justice and stability.
The program looks at the intersection between Economic research and development. It filters original insights from macroeconomic analysis through a multidisciplinary lens that embodies the social and moral infrastructure of community life. It rebuilds multisectoral analyses and deepens multifaceted interrelationship between economic policies and political economy of government decision and intervention.
The program will sponsor and undertake research on seeking alternative economic policies that will fit best with the lived experiences of national and subnational states. The researches and policy prescriptions will focus on broader social economic indicators and variables that promote human development, sustained productivity and distributional fairness.
The media and cultural studies program of The Abuja School of Social and Political Thought seeks to unravel the critical role the media and culture play in Nigerian, African, and global political, social, and economic spheres and how they contribute to shape our social being and structure our social relations.
The program will examine how media and culture interact with society and the prevailing and underlying effects of such interaction on our political and democratic spaces. The task therefore is primarily to contextualize and conceptualize the various layers of media, communication, and cultural ideologies in the simplest form, therebyenhancing our knowledge of critical issues within the broader discursive spaces.
This program studies the relationship between national security and social and economic policies, and how the relationshipcan lead to sustainability. It focuses on human security, which goes beyond the narrow subject of national security, and prioritizes social and economic justice and the effective use of resources to create wealth and just distribution to ensure fair consumption.
The program seeks an integrated and multidisciplinary understanding of peace studies, criminology, and international peace and conflict to strengthen internal and external security in the state and to gain clarity on the changing roles of state and non-state actors in preventing and protecting international peace and security. The program is citizen-centric, and mainstreams concerns about poverty and inequality in building the foundations of human development.