Profile
Prof. Edem Adotey is a historian in the History and Politics Section of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, where he teaches courses on African Historiography and Methodology, The Slave Trade and Africa, Colonial Rule and African Responses and History of Pan-Africanism at the Graduate level and Chieftaincy and Development at the Undergraduate level.
Prof. Adotey is a Fulbright Scholar and a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies.
Research Areas
His primary research interest lies in African borderlands, particularly the Ghana–Togo border. His research focuses on cross-border governance, identities and festivities in African borderlands, particularly how African borders shape governance, belonging, and mobility in postcolonial contexts.
Selected Publications
“Aɖaʋatram (madness has led me astray): Ritual Archives and Ewe Identities on the Ghana-Togo Borderlands.” History in Africa (2025), 1-13.
“Anatomy of a Border: Contradictory Discourses on Othering and Mobilities on the Ghana-Togo border?” Africa Spectrum 60, no. 2 (2025): 266-286.
Tsikata, Dzodzi, Edem Adotey, and Mjiba Frehiwot, eds. The Unfinished Business of Liberation and Transformation: Revisiting the 1958 All-African People's Conference. Quebec: Daraja Press, 2024.
Adotey, Edem and Samuel Aniegye Ntewusu “‘Oil Palm Branch to Oil Palm Branch’: Festivals, Borders, and Trans-Border Ewe Ethnic Identities on the Ghana-Togo Border.” Journal of Borderland Studies 40 (2024): 1235-1254.
“Transnational Citizenship on the Borderlands: Towards Making (Non) Sense of National Borders in Africa.” Contemporary Journal of African Studies (CJAS) 10, no. 1 & 2 (2023): 74-100.
“‘9th May 2017 is our Day’: The Homeland Study Group Foundation and Contested National Imaginaries in Post-Independence Ghana.” Nations and Nationalism 28 (2022): 662-679.
“Kwame Nkrumah: Visions of Liberation.” Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des études Africaines 56, no.2 (2022): 462-463.
“Multiplicity and Simultaneity in Ethnographic Research: Exploring the Use of Drones in Ghana.” African Affairs, 120, no. 480 (2021): 445-459.
“Decolonising Governance: The State and Chieftaincy Conflicts on the Ghana-Togo Borderlands.” The Africa Governance Papers 1, no. 1 (2021): 6-27.
“Operation Eagle Eye”: Border Citizenship and Cross-border Voting in Ghana’s Fourth Republic.” Journal of Borderlands Studies 38, no. 1 (2020): 21-38.
“An Imaginary Line? Decolonisation, Bordering and Borderscapes on the Ghana–Togo Border.” Third World Quarterly 42, no. 5 (2020): 1069-1086.
“A Matter of Apostrophe? Founder’s Day, Founders’ Day, and Holiday Politics in Contemporary Ghana.” Journal of West African History 5, no. 2 (2019): 113–140.
“Parallel or Dependent? The State, Chieftaincy, and Institutions of Governance in Ghana.” African Affairs 184, no. 473 (2019): 628-645.
“‘International Chiefs’: Chieftaincy, Rituals and the Reproduction of trans-border Ewe Ethnic Communities on the Ghana–Togo Boundary.” Africa 88, no. 3 (2018): 560-78.
“Where Is My Name? – Contemporary Funeral Posters as an Arena of Contestation and (Re)Negotiation of Chiefly Relations Among the Ewe of Ghana and Togo.” History in Africa 45 (2018): 59-69.
“The Paradox of Colonialism: The German Colonial Project, Pan-Ewe Identity and Consciousness in Togo, 1884-1914.” In Germany and its West African Colonies: “Excavations” of German Colonialism in Post-Colonial Times, edited by Wazi Apoh and Beatrice Lundt. Lit-Verlag, 2013.