No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
African agency and global orders: the demanding case of nuclear arms control
Abstract
How much agency do African states have to shape global orders? This study puts the global nuclear order under scrutiny to answer this question. It amounts to a demanding case. Arms control is something that global great powers take very seriously, and there is no weapons category that they take more seriously than nuclear weapons. My findings provide a nuanced picture. Although often outflanked and frustrated by nuclear weapon states, the nuclear order would look different without African actors exerting their agency. They successfully shaped background and foreground institutions constituting the global nuclear order by building advocacies for new institutions upon already existing ones, reaching out to state and non-state actors outside of Africa, and channelling communication through African states with authority in global fora. This study makes three contributions: First, it underlines the key finding of recent literature on African agency that African actors are more to be reckoned with than often assumed. Second, it provides novel evidence about the diplomatic mechanisms through which they come to make a difference. Third, it adds to our grasp of the constitution of global orders as well as the processes through which they come to be made, re-made and unmade more generally.
... They do not constitute a separate 'African nuclear order'-if such an order can even be said to exist (cf. Kornprobst 2020). ...
... Markus Kornprobst presents compelling evidence of African agency in the most constrained of global settings: nuclear arms control agreements. 15 Mzukisi Qobo discusses Africa's agency as rooted in inclusive institutions, sound governance, and structural transformation that is anchored in digital change. 16 The contention of this article is that Africa's meaningful participation in shaping the global system can be realised only by reducing reliance on major powers, and by building strong institutions domestically, engendering effective and inclusive governance systems. ...
Ongoing US–China geopolitical rivalry could harm Africa. As in the case of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, when African countries were treated like pawns on a global chessboard, African countries risk getting caught in current US–China geopolitical tensions. These are intensifying following the COVID-19 pandemic when many Africa states are facing their worst socio-economic crisis since independence, as well as a sovereign debt crisis not seen since the 1980s. Africa is institutionally underprepared for the combined effects of these developments. Partly, this is due to persistent governance deficiencies, a constrained global trading environment, and economic under-performance continent-wide. And partly, this is accounted for by Africa’s marginal position in the global system. This article outlines Africa’s potential development pathways against this harsh backdrop, assessing the options for African agency in response to geopolitical rivalries playing out in technology, global supply chains and trade.
... Norms, policies and practices can travel from the AU to the UN (Coleman and Tieku 2018), and the AU has been the leader in institutionalising some norms, such as the anti-coup norm (Tansey 2018). Overall, there are many examples of African agency (Kornprobst 2020;Wilén and Fisher 2022). In the field of peace operations, some innovations, such as firewood patrols (peacekeepers accompanying women who leave displacement settlements to collect firewood in order to protect them from violence) were pioneered by the AU Mission in Sudan (Wills 2009), continued in the joint UN-AU mission and subsequently became a 'best practice' that the UN recommends for all missions with a PoC mandate (UN 2012). ...
Norms can be adopted without modifications or adapted to regional contexts for strategic or principled reasons. Norm adoption and adaptation can also happen by chance. When adoption takes place without consideration of the norm’s effectiveness or appropriateness, we speak about imitation. When adaptation takes place in such a manner, we lack conceptual tools to analyse it. We propose a novel concept of incidental adaptation – divergence between promoted and adopted norms due to fortuitous events. This completes the typology of scenarios leading to norm adoption and adaptation. We apply the typology to the transmission of the protection of civilians norm in peace operations from the United Nations (UN) to the African Union (AU). The AU adopted the UN’s approaches in pursuit of interoperability and resources, and out of recognition of the UN’s normative authority. It also happened incidentally when the AU temporarily followed the UN’s approaches. The AU engaged in adaptation to reflect the nature of its operations and normative orientations of AU member states. Incidental adaptation accounted for the presence of the rights-based tier in the AU’s protection of civilians concept. These findings nuance our understanding of norm diffusion, inter-organisational relations and the role of chance in international affairs.
Since the late 1990s, the critical study of security has crystallised into a professional field of study – Critical Security Studies (CSS) – complete with theoretical schools, journals, and disciplinary narratives that recount its birth and development. The establishment of CSS as a separate field of inquiry distinct from conventional approaches to security is a remarkable achievement but has also come at a price. We argue that this is especially apparent in relation to the limited role Cold War history plays in CSS. Disciplinary narratives of the field tend to conflate the Cold War period with conventional security theory or strategic studies, thus downplaying the originality and importance of critical perspectives articulated during this protracted conflict. Emphasising the deep entanglements of the Cold War nuclear arms race with questions of ecological contamination, democracy, race, and decolonisation, we argue that these intersections are worth revisiting as intellectual precursors and foundations for CSS. We briefly illustrate this argument by highlighting important challenges to conventional security thinking that were formulated at three interconnected sites during the early Cold War: the 1955 Bandung Conference, Pan-African resistance to French nuclear testing in Algeria, and African-American anti-nuclear activism.
While post-development theory is very concerned with the ways in
which development has impacted upon the countries of the Global
South, there has been relatively little written on post-development
theory from an African perspective. This paper identifies some of
the ways in which post-development theory fails to adequately
understand the African experience of development. In particular,
I explore the difficulty that post-development theory confronts
when faced with the continued desire on the part of many people
in Africa for development. In his introduction to the new edition of
The Development Dictionary, Wolfgang Sachs discusses this desire,
noting that despite development’s many failures, many still associate
the concept with self-affirmation and redress. He explains this
continued desire for development as being indicative of the need
for the decolonisation of the imagination. In this paper, I show some
of the problems with this explanation and present alternative ways of
understanding the persistence of the desire for development in Africa.
It is argued that China’s relationship with Africa has transformed into one defined by a dynamism and African agency, thereby lessening the hold the former previously had on Africa in the early days of this evolving alliance. First, the authors will conduct a literature review of historical Sino–African relations, from the early Han dynasty to its contemporary manifestations. The second section will continue with this analysis by focusing exclusively on the status quo of the Sino–African economic relationship, including analysis of trade flows, investments, development, economic cooperation, and Chinese support for regional integration. Finally, this paper will conclude with an elaboration of some key, emerging relationship areas, such as opportunities for China and Africa to collaborate on the achievement of the latter’s Agenda 2063 and African Mining Vision.
This chapter unpacks individualist and collectivist worldviews in social science scholarship to show that many scholars in the English-speaking international relations (IR) community look at the world through the prism of individualism, which usually renders unheard the international experiences and voices of people in the global South. The neglect in IR theories and discourse of experiences and voices of the invisible majority undercuts our ability to gain a comprehensive understanding of global life. Key collectivist features of Africa’s IR are critically examined in the chapter and their ontological origins traced. The suggestion is that taking these collectivist features seriously and incorporating them into the analytical toolkits of IR would better enable scholars to gain a broader and deeper understanding of international affairs.
Defines and elucidates the concept of ‘background ideas’; Defines and elucidates neo-liberalism and its relationship to background ideas; Uses discursive institutionalism as framework for analysis of background ideas and neo-liberalism; Explores different levels of neo-liberal ideas in terms of philosophy, program, and policy; Considers how different levels of ideas may be transformed over time through revolutionary or evolutionary change; Examines different forms of ideas, especially as philosophies, ideologies, and discourse, and different types of ideas, both cognitive and normative; Considers the different ways in which ideas are constructed and communicated by policy or political entrepreneurs and/or act in discursive policy communities; Discusses political entrepreneurs as ideological, pragmatic, or opportunistic.
Neo-liberalism has come to constitute the core background idea of European political economies, as the unquestioned set of beliefs, understandings, or core philosophy exercising a seemingly incontrovertible hold since the 1980s in Europe. Using a discursive institutionalist framework, this article defines background ideas; describes their different forms, levels, and types; theorizes about the nature of continuity and change in such ideas; and considers the agents and discursive processes through which such ideas are constructed and disseminated. It illustrates throughout with examples of neo-liberalism, from the philosophical origins through its many different permutations in different institutional contexts over time. This article concludes that although ‘background ideas’ as a concept remains somewhat elusive, it is nonetheless useful as a way of understanding how neo-liberalism has managed to infuse people’s deepest assumptions about the possible and thereby to set the limits of the imaginable with regard to political economic action.
In this 2004 book, Barry Buzan offers an extensive critique and reappraisal of the English school approach to International Relations. Starting on the neglected concept of world society and bringing together the international society tradition and the Wendtian mode of constructivism, Buzan offers a new theoretical framework that can be used to address globalisation as a complex political interplay among state and non-state actors. This approach forces English school theory to confront neglected questions about both its basic concepts and assumptions, and about the constitution of society in terms of what values are shared, how and why they are shared, and by whom. Buzan highlights the idea of primary institutions as the central contribution of English school theory and shows how this both differentiates English school theory from realism and neoliberal institutionalism, and how it can be used to generate distinctive comparative and historical accounts of international society.
In this book Peter Schraeder offers the first comprehensive theoretical analysis of US foreign policy toward Africa in the postwar era. He argues that though we often assume that US policymakers 'speak with one voice', Washington's foreign policy is, however, derived from numerous centres of power which each have the ability to pull policy in different directions. The book describes the evolution of policy at three levels: Presidents and their close advisors; the bureaucracies of the executive branch; and Congress and African affairs interest groups. Most importantly, the evidence presented demonstrates that the nature of events in Africa has itself affected the operation of the US policymaking process, and the substance of US policy. Drawing on over 100 interviews, and detailed case studies in Zaire, Ethiopia-Somalia and South Africa, this book provides a unique analysis of the historical evolution of US foreign policy towards Africa from the 1940s to the 1990s.
In any multilateral setting, some state representatives weigh much more heavily than others. Practitioners often refer to this form of diplomatic hierarchy as the ‘international pecking order’. This book is a study of international hierarchy in practice, as it emerges out of the multilateral diplomatic process. Building on the social theories of Erving Goffman and Pierre Bourdieu, it argues that diplomacy produces inequality. Delving into the politics and inner dynamics of NATO and the UN as case studies, Vincent Pouliot shows that pecking orders are eminently complex social forms: contingent yet durable; constraining but also full of agency; operating at different levels, depending on issues; and defined in significant part locally, in and through the practice of multilateral diplomacy.
This conclusion/projection suggests that the quarter of the world’s states that are African can yet contribute to global development/security/governance as the North enters a period of ambivalence about, if not retreat from, positive global engagement. This conclusion suggests that the diversion away from international order/peace of the USA under Trump, the UK under May and the European Union can be positive for African agency/development if the continent can seize the unprecedented space to advance its own ‘developmental’ states and regionalisms (Kyung-Sup 2012). I situate such possibilities of Africa’s enhanced prospects in terms of a changing global political economy in which ‘new’ economies, companies and technologies are ‘emerging’ along with, contrary, non-traditional security (NTS) threats. In response, novel forms of transnational ‘network’ governance are being conceived and charted to advance sustainable developmental states and regionalisms and innovative ‘foreign policy’ stances outside established, but increasingly dysfunctional and ossified, interstate institutions.
The field of International Relations (IR) continues to grapple with its treatment of Sub-Saharan Africa. The continent and its individual countries are often as a peripheral actor in both global politics.
What explains the design and development of funding rules at international organizations? I investigate this question in the context of the United Nations system, which has undergone a dramatic shift in financing. Long associated with mandatory contributions, the United Nations increasingly relies on voluntary resources earmarked by individual donors. Previous studies have investigated the financing puzzle from a behavioral perspective and have found that wealthy donors use voluntary funding to rein in costs and constrain international organization programs. Providing an alternative theoretical approach, I investigate the financing puzzle from an institutional design perspective. I provide original United Nations funding rule data to demonstrate that it is not only funding practices, but also underlying funding rules, that have changed over time. I theorize how states with favorable views of the United Nations that sought to expand its activities — rather than those that desired to constrain it — had incentives to introduce funding rules that offered more flexibility and control to donors. I test the argument with a longitudinal case study of funding rule design and change at United Nations economic development institutions. The article expands the institutional design literature by integrating funding rules as a consequential design component and provides a novel explanation for changes in United Nations financing.
The Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) continuously seeks to assert itself as a voice of the peoples of the world in global debates, where geopolitical interests of states, often representing political and economic elites, dominate. This article critically analyses one of the latest contributions to norm setting and idea-generation by the IPU: the concepts of ubuntu and sumak kawsay (also known as buen vivir in Spanish and living well in English) as the basis for the international response to the challenge of failed development strategies globally. This proposal from the IPU arises from the exhaustion of the dominant discourses and concepts underpinning international development. These discourses are based on the colonial model of power and are increasingly being challenged by calls from subaltern voices for ‘unthinking, rethinking and delinking’ from hegemonic illusions. Further, the article argues, the proposed ideals of ‘living well’ and ‘human solidarity’ cannot be implemented within the current colonially inspired humanist paradigm, but require a ‘decolonial’ orientation of global humanism.
Since China began enhancing its economic relationship with key African oil exporters from the early 1990s, the effect this has had on the International Relations (IR) of Africa has remained largely unknown. This paper delves into African IR theory and finds that, rather than representing an alternative pole for African states to bandwagon with, China’s limited interest in Africa and its international socialisation, along with a possible growth of the middle class in Africa, is likely to give many African states few alternatives than those which have existed thus far in the postcolonial period. More development options are found to lie in sub-regional integration.
The current initiative on the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons has offered States the opportunity to reinvigorate the disarmament debate. While Africa has taken this opportunity to engage on nuclear disarmament, the impact of its efforts remains to be seen. The purpose of this article is to recall the value of African engagement, and to identify the important role that South Africa could play in leading the African continent in its call for a world free of nuclear weapons.
This lively book interrogates the African postcolonial condition with a focus on the thematics of liberation predicament and the long standing crisis of dependence (epistemological, cultural, economic, and political) created by colonialism and coloniality. A sophisticated deployment of historical, philosophical, and political knowledge in combination with the equi-primordial concepts of coloniality of power, coloniality of being, and coloniality of knowledge yields a comprehensive and truly refreshing understanding of African realities of subalternity. How global imperial designs and coloniality of power shaped the architecture of African social formations and disciplined the social forces towards a convoluted ëpostcolonial neocolonizedí paralysis dominated by myths of decolonization and illusions of freedom emerges poignantly in this important book. What distinguishes this book is its decolonial entry that enables a critical examination of the grammar of decolonization that is often wrongly conflated with that of emancipation; bold engagement with the intractable question of what and who is an African; systematic explication of the role of coloniality in sustaining Euro-American hegemony; and unmasking of how the ëpostcolonialí is interlocked with the ëneocolonialí paradoxically. It is within this context that the postcolonial African state emerges as a leviathan, and the ëpostcolonialí reality becomes a terrain of contradictions mediated by the logic of violence. No doubt, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheniís handling of complex concepts and difficult questions of the day is remarkable, particularly the decoding and mixing of complex theoretical interventions from Africa and Latin America to enlighten the present, without losing historical perspicacity. To buttress the theoretical arguments, detailed empirical case studies of South Africa, Zimbabwe, DRC and Namibia completes this timely contribution to African Studies.
International Relations, as a discipline, tends to focus upon European and Western canons of modern social and political thought. Alternatively, this book explores the global imperial and colonial context within which knowledge of modernity has been developed. The chapters sketch out the historical depth and contemporary significance of non-Western thought on modernity, as well as the rich diversity of its individuals, groups, movements and traditions. The contributors theoretically and substantively engage with non-Western thought in ways that refuse to render it exotic to, superfluous to or derivative of the orthodox Western canon of social and political thought. Taken as a whole, the book provides deep insights into the contested nature of a global modernity shaped so fundamentally by Western colonialism and imperialism. Now, as ever, these insights are desperately needed for a discipline that is so closely implicated in Western foreign policy making and yet retains such a myopic horizon of inquiry. This work provides a significant contribution to the field and will be of great interest to all scholars of politics, political theory and international relations theory. © 2011 Editorial selection and matter, Robbie Shilliam. All rights reserved.
This book places the lens on postcolonial agency and resistance in a social and geopolitical context that has witnessed great transformations in international politics. What does postcolonial politics mean in a late modern context of interventions that seek to govern postcolonial populations? Drawing on historic and contemporary articulations of agency and resistance and highlighting voices from the postcolonial world, the book explores the transition from colonial modernity to the late modern postcolonial era. It shows that at each moment wherein the claim to politics is made, the postcolonial subject comes face to face with global operations of power that seek to control and govern. As seen in the Middle East and elsewhere, these operations have variously drawn on war, policing, as well as pedagogical practices geared at governing the political aspirations of target societies. The book provides a conceptualisation of postcolonial political subjectivity, discusses moments of its emergence, and exposes the security agendas that seek to govern it. Engaging with political thought, from Hannah Arendt, to Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and Edward Said, among other critical and postcolonial theorists, and drawing on art, literature, and film from the postcolonial world, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars of critical international relations, postcolonial theory, and political theory.
John Hobson claims that throughout its history most international theory has been embedded within various forms of Eurocentrism. Rather than producing value-free and universalist theories of inter-state relations, international theory instead provides provincial analyses that celebrate and defend Western civilization as the subject of, and ideal normative referent in, world politics. Hobson also provides a sympathetic critique of Edward Said's conceptions of Eurocentrism and Orientalism, revealing how Eurocentrism takes different forms, which can be imperialist or anti-imperialist, and showing how these have played out in international theory since 1760. The book thus speaks to scholars of international relations and also to all those interested in understanding Eurocentrism in the disciplines of political science/political theory, political economy/international political economy, geography, cultural and literary studies, sociology and, not least, anthropology.
This article investigates the regional dynamics of African agency in the case of negotiations on an Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) between the EU and a group of Southern African countries, known as SADC-Minus. I argue that these negotiations were shaped by a pattern of differentiated responses to the choice set on offer under the EPAs by SADC-Minus policy makers and by a series of strategic interactions and power plays between them. I offer two contributions to an emerging literature on the role of African agency in international politics. First, I argue for a clear separation between ontological claims about the structure–agency relationship and empirical questions about the preferences, strategies and influence of African actors. Second, I suggest that, in order to understand the regional dynamics of African agency, it is important to pay close attention to the diversity and contingency of African preferences and to the role of both power politics and rhetorical contestation in regional political processes.
Distinguishes five contending International Relations perspectives on background ideas Calls for more cross-fertilisation across perspectives to deal with conceptual challenges pertaining to backgrounds, agency, as well as change and persistence Summarises contributions to forum
The actors we study do not reflect upon their background ideas. They simply take them for granted. Precisely because of this taken-for-grantedness, these ideas are very powerful. They shape world politics in profound ways. The discipline of International Relations has neglected background ideas for a long time. In the last two decades, however, a heterogeneous cluster of research has developed that inquires into what constitutes background ideas, how backgrounds affect politics, and how they come to change. The purpose of this special forum is to take stock of the current state of research, to make authors embracing different perspectives on background ideas engage with one another’s arguments, and thus to improve our explanatory and normative understandings of backgrounds in world politics.
This paper examines the rather limited African experience of nuclear weapons, and the implications of global nuclear weapon possession and proliferation - and responses against it - for Africa. Because there is a contingent, but not necessary, relationship between civil nuclear power and nuclear weapons, it also touches on civil nuclear issues in Africa, and the implications of uranium production. Since the only country in Africa that has actually developed both nuclear energy and nuclear weapons is South Africa, much of the focus is on that country. As a result of its prowess in this field, South Africa also inevitably leads African diplomacy on nuclear governance issues. Before turning to African implications, however, it is necessary to contextualise these issues in the global framework.
African states' attendance at and participation in the preparations for the 2015 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) has produced mixed results, with the continent acting as both agent and bystander in respect of certain issues. African agency is evident in, for example, its position as a member of groupings on Iran's nuclear weapons programme and the Middle East Nuclear Weapons Free Zone. Less agency is evident in states' individual actions. This underscores the importance of African states' preference for multilateralism. However, African agency is also less evident in African multilateral efforts at the NPT preparatory meetings. The impact of these developments on the 2015 NPT Review Conference is too soon to tell but may bode ill for African agency.
This article examines the perspective of the United States on the role nuclear co-operation and assistance played in the development of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Many scholars and policy-makers believe the NPT codified a basic bargain. The United States and its nuclear-armed partners would provide civil nuclear assistance to other countries in exchange for adherence to the treaty. The United States consented to the insertion of an amendment into the treaty promoting civil nuclear co-operation and assistance. This revision created less of an incentive for participation than is commonly assumed. The treaty did not bar nuclear assistance to states that refused to adhere, and US officials indicated they would continue nuclear co-operation with states unlikely to join. The United States was not very committed to trading civil nuclear assistance for non-proliferation commitments, calling into question the idea that the NPT represented a bargain.
An important political consequence of the crisis of capital in the 1970s has been an increasing intensification of informal imperialism within Africa. This paper argues that the advanced capitalist countries again confronted the endemic problem of overcapacity alongside a decline in the rate of profit and that the major neoliberal reforms foisted upon the African continent were part of the spatio-temporal fix that followed. The quotidian management of many African states was not an intended consequence of structural adjustment, but the subsequent perturbations that beset many developing countries after following such policies has led to such a degree of institutional instability that a new form of imperial governance has come into being. Juridical sovereignty has been maintained, but political sovereignty has been severely compromised through the emergence of this neo-imperial governance. Today an array of external actors is embedded in the sinews of these states, setting the general parameters of state policy to such an extent that one can no longer speak of these countries as possessing de facto independence. The rise of these so-called ‘governance states’ and the new emphasis on ‘governance with government’ constitute a new non-territorial, political form of imperialism.