Despite the rise of Africa’s geopolitical and economic power, scholarly and practical efforts to understand Africa and Africa-Asia relations are not yet mainstream in Seoul National University (SNU) and the Korean academia. As the first-born research institute specializing African Studies in SNU, the Asia-Africa Center (AAC) aims to collect various perspectives on Africa in SNU communities and beyond, harness the integrity of its interdisciplinary scholarship on Africa, and enhance the connectivity of the two great civilizations – Asia and Africa.
The AAC seeks to reinvigorate the legacies of the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, in which Afro-Asian economic and cultural cooperation within the Global South was promoted and a new political identity of non-alignment was forged. Anchored in the Bandung spirit, our vision is to pioneer African Studies through the spectrum of Asian and Korean reflections, thereby allowing the AAC to be an academic hub of African Studies in Korea and enabling it to be globally recognized research institute committed to enriching authentic knowledge on African perspectives.