Aminata Diaw

Aminata Diaw Cissé (24 May 1959 – 14 April 2017) was a Senegalese lecturer and political philosopher who taught at the Cheikh Anta Diop University (UCAD). Influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and her academia background, she wrote about citizenship, civil society, democracy, development, ethnicity, gender, globalisation, human rights, identity, nationality and the state in an African and Senegalese context by using a political insight. Diaw worked for the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), Bellagio Study and Conference Center of the Rockfeller Foundation, National UNESCO Sub-Commission on Social Sciences and Humanities, West African Research Association, the National UNESCO Sub-Commission on Social Sciences and Humanities and the Philosophical and Epistemological Research Center of the Doctoral School Studies.

Quotes

• It operates as one of the political idioms at the very moment when democracy is becoming essential as a universal, unavoidable reference.
  • [1]
• The crucial questions, when thinking about emergent humanisms, have to do with the exegesis of the political, and at its heart democracy, citizenship and the management of violence, which obstinately appears as a constant in the political experience in Africa.
  • [2]
• What is being challenged is the sovereignty of the state, which means that the symbolic construction of a people transforming the state into a nation state is no longer possible
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• The African state seems unable any longer to guarantee its citizens’ security. The human body is becoming an integral part of the territories where conflict is occurring.
  • [4]
• So how can we imagine a space for interaction where collective issues are put up for discussion? The case of Côte d’Ivoire, the reform of the Family Code in Senegal, and the tragedy in Rwanda are examined.
  • [5]