Twenty years later, the Iberian Congress of African Studies returns to Barcelona, organized by the Group of Studies on Culture and Domination – Group of Studies on African Societies (GECID-GESA), of the University of Barcelona.
And, as then, the congress aims to invite all social and academic sectors to approach African societies.
At that time, the intention was to draw attention to the incorporation of Africa into global society, addressing the prospects of a nascent Afro-optimism, through the metaphor “Africa walks”.
Now, under the title, African responses to the decolonial dilemma, the congress invites to explore the African role in the constitution of a global society that can only be inclusive and real if it assumes its diversity.
Precisely, the “decolonial dilemma” highlights the difficulties arising from the dominance of the “Western component” in the management of difference.
In this sense, the long experience of African cultural pluralism is an essential asset to facilitate coexistence and mutual enrichment based on the multiple memories and dynamics that converge in globalization.
These memories, so often at odds with each other – as is the case with colonial legacies, very much present today – are much more than discourses: they materialize and emanate from very different solidarities, but all of them are essential for planetary social cohesion.
Africa has much to say in the articulation of this multiplicity.

The mandate issued in Granada 2018, led to the constitution of an Iberian network in Lisbon 2022. The organizer, the History Center of the University of Lisbon, then recommitted itself to collaborate, through an Installing Commission, to give it legal and material form and to present a proposal for its implementation at the next congress, in Barcelona 2025. Thus, the ICAE 12 will become the first assembly of the new African Studies Network which, woven from the Africanist research centers and groups of the Peninsula, opens up to the world through the connection with its partners, particularly in Africa. The Iberian Congress of African Studies will therefore become the great biennial meeting of the African Studies Network.