Elias Papaioannou is a Professor of Economics at the London School of Business (at the start of the podcast, I incorrectly say that he's at the London School of Economics).
Professor Papaioannou has authored the following academic papers on Africa:
- The long-run effects of the scramble for Africa
- The scramble for Africa and its legacy
- Pre-colonial ethnic institutions and contemporary African development
Because of his expertise and research on Africa's borders, I asked him many questions about them:
- Did the colonialists do any good with the borders?
- How do African borders compare to borders on other continents?
- How did the African political map look prior to colonization?
- How much better of a map could the Africans have drawn?
- Was violence widespread in pre-Colonial Africa?
- Do we place too much emphasis on the importance of the colonial borders?
As you can see, these contrarian questions stir some fascinating debate.
This is a case where I prefer the audio over the video simply because I edited out the delay that often occurred between us when we were talking due to our large time zone gap.
Still, it's worth seeing the video at minute 36 because that's when that ever-changing map of Europe pops up. Pretty cool.
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