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China’s Enduring and Expanding Influence: The Quest for Centrality in Sub-Saharan Africa Political Economy
Abstract
Beijing’s influence in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is enduring and expanding, even amid the present decrease in China’s loans to the region. Three interconnected elements contribute to Beijing’s escalating significance: 1) A strategic emphasis on centrality through connectivity integrates African nations into the Beijing sphere, solidifying its pivotal role in the regional production network, extending economic and geopolitical reach, and securing vital resources while building political support; 2) Establishing institutional arrangements that are largely accepted by many African governments enhances Beijing’s appeal as an attractive partner; 3) Power asymmetry positions China as a pervasive actor in the African political economy, wielding tools like debt, financial, and trade dependencies, once exclusive to Western powers (Lendzoumbou 2024). These mechanisms synergistically sustain China’s influence in SSA amid the current cascade of crises.
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China’s increased engagements in Africa over the past two decades have been as notable as they have been controversial. While some have predicted China’s economic stagnation as a result of issues such as debt, supply chain shortening as a result of the impacts of COVID and the impact of strict lockdowns in that country, others see its economy dramatically rebounding. However, it appears that Chinese lending to Africa has now peaked and is in precipitous decline. Other indicators of economic engagement have also decreased and other powers are also now vigorously contesting for space on the continent. This paper examines whether or not we are now in a period “post-peak China in Africa” and the reconfiguration of strategies of influence. The original Ian Taylor Memorial Lecture under the same title held on April 27, 2023 at the University of Pécs has been edited and headings added for clarity, and references included/provided.
Waning debt sustainability has challenged the debt-financed, infrastructure-led global expansion of Chinese capital. This article traces the gradual shift in the financial governance of the Belt and Road Initiative towards public–private partnerships (PPPs). We first document China's domestic PPP experience and its failure to check the unsustainable indebtedness of sub-national governments. We then conceptualise China's “turn” towards PPPs in Africa as an attempt at “metagoverning” its current growth model. Analysing official Chinese sources, we discern dominant Chinese narratives that present PPPs as panaceas for African debt problems. However, Chinese risk perceptions and empirical examples, such as the Nairobi Expressway, the Tanzania–Zambia Railway, and the Congolese Kolwezi–Kasumbalesa toll road, reveal that China's experimentation with PPPs in Africa engenders new challenges, including popular contestation, controversies over financial terms and corruption. Furthermore, contrary to the official Chinese narrative, profit imperatives behind PPP investments and potential financial complications that were widespread in China's domestic PPP experience risk adding to the financial burdens of African governments and populations.
Since the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was initiated in 2013, China under Xi Jinping has continued to expand its capital to various countries. This expansion is part of China’s strategy to shore up its position as a major global economic and political power vis-à-vis the United States. As nearly 70 countries have joined the BRI network, this economic cooperation scheme contributes to economic growth and helps close the infrastructure gap. Nevertheless, the case of China’s capital expansion in Africa has shown mixed results, where some economies are becoming more dependent and even facing a debt trap. This article addresses why such economic cooperation has turned into a debt trap for countries in the African region. Applying the concept of Structural Power in examining China’s investment in Zimbabwe, Cameroon, and Djibouti, this article argues that the debt trap has been caused by the structural disparity between China as an investor and African countries as investment recipients. China, in this case, has a more dominant “good” aspect, while African countries are more in “need.” This article also contends that the debt trap is a strategy carried out by the Chinese government to dominate the African economies in the long run. The three case studies are valuable as they represented different geographical locations in the region and portray a border of lower middle-income countries in general.
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a massive Chinese state/capitalist programme of transnational infrastructure construction initiated in 2013. Between 2013 and 2016, Chinese banks extended hundreds of billions of dollars-principally across Asia, but also Europe and Africa-for transportation and energy networks. Recently released statistics, however, suggest that project lending for the BRI collapsed from 2016 onwards. Our paper examines the reasons for this contraction through a case-study of the BRI in Africa. We contend that the lending contraction resulted from political and economic contradictions generated by this form of international interconnection, including the types of debt traps it helped create. This outcome is explained partly by the fact that the BRI is simultaneously a geopolitical and geoeconomic project. Whereas the balance of economic risks is arguably skewed against borrowers (in some cases leading to debt traps), from a geo-political perspective, the Chinese state also seeks to expand influence in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world. This creates counter pressure on further expansion of such financing, which, complemented by domestic economic implications of loan failure, helps to explain the contraction.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits adaptation, alteration, reproduction and distribution for non-commercial use, without further permission provided the original work is attributed. The derivative works do not need to be licensed on the same terms. Since the mid-1990s the Chinese state and the country's businesses have significantly increased their activity throughout the Global South. In International Development, China's impacts on this varied meta-region have generated substantial interest in recent years due to their scale, scope and distinctive nature. Understandably, given the complexity of the subject, most analyses have focused on discrete aspects of Chinese engagement rather than attempting to undertake more comprehensive assessments around its nature and evolution. This article engages this lacuna by identifying the main vectors of China's engagement in the Global South, and examining their adaptive nature. In particular it identifies the main channels of impact and intersection before focusing on China's signature foreign economic policy, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), to ground the analysis. The article then examines the ways in which China is reconfiguring its foreign economic diplomacy in response to the issue of infrastructure-linked debt-perhaps the most controversial aspect of China's growing global presence. We demonstrate that the Chinese 'development' policy is currently undergoing a substantial reorganisation towards soft power initiatives in response to (geo)political backlashes arising from the previous implementation of the BRI and the risks such loans present to the Chinese economy. We characterise this as an attempt at 'normalisation' of China as a 'donor', suggesting the power of global public opinion despite the 'omni-channel politics' and other power resources the country can bring to bear.
The China–Africa relationship has received increased interest over the past few decades as scholars critically examine the challenge that China, in its quest for a closer strategic partnership with Africa, poses to the norms governing the neoliberal world order (NLWO). One crucial aspect of this is international aid, and how Chinese aid to Africa differs from Western aid. This paper argues that Chinese aid reduces the power of traditional aid donors to shape the development route of African countries. This new development finance ultimately breaks the monopoly of Western aid to decide how poor countries in the global ‘South’ develop. In doing so, the Sino–African aid relationship is challenging the current world order as it offers African states the possibility to decouple (or delink) themselves from the global economy. By challenging assumed neoliberal economic development fundamentals, this relationship, if harnessed correctly by African leaders, can pose longer-term ideological questions around the very set of ideas that underpin development itself, while enabling African states the policy space needed to pursue more sustainable development from an Afro-centric perspective. It is this possibility to delink, due to changing ideological fundamentals concerning economic development, that is the challenge China and Africa pose to the NLWO.
This article starts from the premise that International Political Economy (IPE) literature – with some notable exceptions – has a blind spot for the colonial and contested histories of financial infrastructures. Often considered to be the mere ‘plumbing’ of international finance, financial infrastructures instead are profoundly political and rooted in long-term colonial histories. To start addressing these blind spots, the article draws on literatures in critical infrastructure studies, that offer understandings of infrastructure as lively, contested and profoundly political. The argument is that attending to infrastructure inevitably brings into view the postcolonial nature of contemporary capitalism and finance. The article draws a parallel between the ways in which inequities and dis/connectivities became hard-wired into early modern financial infrastructures, and the ways in which new inequities and disconnections are hard-wired into present-day financial infrastructures through security sanctions. It uses the case of the contemporary payment infrastructure wars, whereby the SWIFT infrastructure is used to enforce sanctions policies, as example to develop the arguments.
This paper discusses China's use of infrastructure-for-resources loans in Africa as a win–win economic cooperation tool. This formula, offering generous loans for infrastructure in exchange for resource access, came into being largely as a default cooperation tool, inspired by China's own domestic experience, its competitive advantages and Africa's receptivity to this kind of barter deal. Embodying the principle of mutual benefit, China has consistently combined the extension of financial assistance for infrastructure construction in Africa with the expansion of Chinese business interests and the pursuit of resource security goals. The analysis focuses on whether this instrument is actually promoting African development or fuelling instead China's economic growth at the expense of African economies. The author argues that the impact has been mixed. Although there are some meaningful positive signs, many challenges persist, and as such the long-term developmental impact of this particular tool remains uncertain. The responsibility to ensure a positive outcome rests, however, on the African side as much as on China.
Available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10220461.2013.811337#.UfDrsNJTCSp
One of the most notable features of the forging of China's new activist foreign policy towards Africa is its emphasis on the historical context of the relationship. These invocations of the past, stretching back to the 15th century but rife with references to events in the 19th century and the cold war period, are regular features of Chinese diplomacy in Africa. Indeed, it is the persistence of its use and the concurrent claim of a continuity of underlying purpose that marks Chinese foreign policy out from western approaches which have by and large been content to avoid discussions of the past (for obvious reasons) or insisting on any policy continuities. However, beneath the platitudes of solidarity is a reading of Chinese historical relations with Africa emanating from Beijing that is, as any student of contemporary African history will know, at times at odds with the historical record of Chinese involvement on the continent.
This article will examine the use and meaning of history in the construction of China's Africa policy. It will do so through first, a brief discussion of the relationship between foreign policy, identity and history; second, a survey of Chinese foreign policy towards Africa from 1955 to 1996; third, an analysis of the implications of Beijing's approach for its efforts to achieve foreign policy aims regionally and globally.
The article explores the role of state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) in the globalisation of China's infrastructure capital. Examining how accumulation strategies of Chinese SOEs are driven by a complex set of political and economic, state and private, interests, it foregrounds the inherently hybrid nature of China's state capitalism. We use Kenya's Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) as a case study to analyse how state infrastructure capital traverses borders, and the specific ways that contradictions of accumulation in China are relocated through the improvised hybridity of SOEs. In Kenya, China Road and Bridge Corporation, the main SGR contractor, shifted and adapted its strategies as the pursuit of economic productivity gave way to political priorities in China, simultaneously responding to changing socio‐political circumstances in Kenya and across East Africa. Analysing these dynamics, we highlight the contingencies of, and limitations to, structural reorganisation of actually existing forms of state capitalism in China and beyond.
Scholars have focused on how the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) facilitates Chinese economic statecraft and its likely impact on the global order. A common thread thereby is how connectivity through China’s construction of physical infrastructures (e.g. ports, roads, railways) represents a source of power. However, such a focus on physical infrastructures obscures the importance of BRI-related financial infrastructures. Addressing this gap, this article analyses the construction of Chinese financial infrastructures along the BRI as an exercise of economic statecraft within the context of the liberal, US-dominated global financial order. The article traces the activities of China’s state-owned exchanges as crucial actors that facilitate financial connectivity by enabling investment into BRI projects (investment opportunities), bringing Chinese investors into BRI markets (investors structure) and gradually shaping how these markets work (investment rules). First, I analyse three individual countries (Pakistan, Kazakhstan and Bangladesh) as examples of ‘bilateral’ and ‘offensive’ statecraft. Second, I analyse an emerging China-centred global network of financial infrastructures as exercise of ‘systemic’ and ‘defensive’ statecraft that shields China’s foreign policy objectives (i.e. BRI) from global pressures, potentially creating a parallel system of capital markets with Chinese characteristics. Beyond BRI, I therefore argue for including financial infrastructures more thoroughly into International Relations (IR)/International Political Economy (IPE) scholarship as important object of analysis.
Considered a counterbalance to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the G7 countries recently launched the Build Back Better World (B3W) initiative, as an alternative channel for aiding lower income countries with infrastructure development. To better understand the strategic competition between Washington and Beijing, this essay analyzes how the Belt and Road Initiative influences China–US competition, especially in the Indo-Pacific region and in the field of digital economy. It also focuses on the B3W initiative, providing a preliminary analysis of the Biden administration’s use of B3W to compete with the Belt and Road Initiative. Through an in-depth investigation of interactions between Washington and Beijing over the Belt and Road Initiative, this essay also helps reveal the nuanced dynamics and characteristics of US–China strategic competition in the context of the digital era. Finally, it argues that international development should not be a zero-sum game in which developing countries facing urgent infrastructure and growth concerns must choose between China and the US.
If it continues, deglobalization may lead not to atomization but two overlapping international orders: a liberal one (LIO) led by the United States, and an authoritarian–capitalist one (ACIO) led by China. This equilibrium could emerge because a central purpose of international orders is to preserve the domestic regimes of their Great Power sponsors. The United States and China have markedly different domestic regimes, and so as China continues to grow in power and influence, tension over the content of international order should continue to grow. I borrow from Darwinian evolution the notion of ‘niche construction’: just as organisms alter phenotype selection by manipulating their natural environments, states can alter the ‘selection’ of domestic regimes by shaping their international environments. Modes of international niche construction include foreign regime promotion, interdependence, transnational interaction and multilateral institutions. The liberal democratic niche constructed by the United States and its allies after the Second World War preserved democracy for many decades. Today, China is attempting through various means to build a niche that will eliminate the liberal bias in international institutions and safeguard its own Market-Leninist regime. The resulting ACIO would select for autocracy and hence be partially separate from the LIO, which selects for liberal democracy.
China has become a leading source of outward foreign direct investment (FDI), and the Chinese state exercises a unique degree of influence over its firms. We explore the patterns of political influence over FDI using a comprehensive firm-level data set on Chinese outward FDI from 2000 to 2013. Using six country-level measures of affinity for China, we find that state-owned and globally diversified firms appear to conform most closely to official guidance. Official investment directives and state visits link investments to state policies; Taiwan recognition and Dalai Lama meetings anchor our political interpretations; and UN General Assembly voting and temporary UN Security Council membership suggest that this intervention may be systematic. The results are robust to country, year, and sector fixed effects, and most do not hold for private or small firms. The results suggest that China uses FDI by prominent state-owned enterprises as an instrument to promote its foreign policy.
With China's rise to become Africa's largest bilateral creditor, much research has focused on an evidence-based critique of the politicised narrative about China's supposed ‘debt trap diplomacy'. At a more fundamental level, this debate problematises the function of debt and related power differentials in late capitalism and calls into question development paradigms, notably the hegemonic infrastructure-led development regime, that have sustained Africa's financial dependency into the 2020s. As the International Monetary Fund is yet again shuttling between Addis Ababa, Lusaka, and Nairobi to resurrect fiscal discipline and to ensure debtor compliance for the post-pandemic ‘payback period', it is argued that (i) periodic cycles of debt financing, debt distress and structural adjustment are a systemic feature of the malintegration of Africa into the global capitalist economy, and (ii) critical research on the social costs and economic beneficiaries of renewed rounds of austerity and privatisation in Africa’s current debt cycle is needed.
China’s breakneck economic growth has been accompanied by an expanding development finance agenda. Many have hypothesized thatChina is undermining the West’s drive to promote good governance globally, and in Africa in particular, by predominantly distributing money to poorly governed countries. This paper explores whether the determinants of Chinese development finance in Africa differ from those of Western countries. It finds that Western countries send more development finance than China to better governed African countries—those with lower corruption levels, better democratic outcomes, and a better human rights track record (though only the latter two have a negative relationship with Chinese development finance in absolute terms). This paper also finds that bilateral trade and UN voting alignment have a stronger impact on China’s development finance than that of Western countries and that China allocates more development finance than the West to richer and more resource-dependent African countries.
China's increasing material capabilities stand at the heart of the US—China power transition debate. The focus on material power reflects a realist definition of power based on the possession of resources. However, material capabilities do not necessarily translate into influence and do not always determine outcomes. Non-material power matters at least as much as material capabilities. This article argues that China under President Xi Jinping views power differently from previous generations of Chinese leaders. While material power remains important, Xi has paid greater attention to strengthening Chinese non-material power, in particular structural power and discursive power. This article examines Chinese structural and discursive power, the third and fourth faces of power, through the lens of Xi's mega-infrastructure vision, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It argues that power, both material and non-material, is embedded in infrastructure. Specifically, the article uses case-studies of Chinese construction of high-speed railways in Laos and Indonesia to illustrate the effects of Chinese structural and discursive power. Based on field work and in-depth interviews, the cases show that China is relatively successful in wielding structural and discursive power in Laos and Indonesia, despite the differences in the two countries' political systems, and economic and population sizes. Chinese domination, however, does not mean that subordinate states do not have agency. For instance, there is resistance against the narrative of a pre-eminent Chinese civilization in Chinese discourse, as the Indonesia case demonstrates. Exploring the different facets of Chinese power is critical for a proper understanding of how China strives to shape the structure and discourse of the global order.
This article analyses the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and its implications for landlocked Ethiopia. Primary and secondary data sources are used to solicit viable information. The BRI is aimed to enhance policy coordination, financial integration, promote trade and investment, cultural exchanges and people-to-people relations across a wide geographical area involving Asia, Europe and Africa. The BRI is the next step in China’s global strategy after the reform and opening-up period, and it is important for job creation, infrastructural development, trade and investment and other related developments for landlocked least developing countries such as Ethiopia. For instance, the construction of the early BRI project of Addis Ababa–Djibouti railway has reduced transport costs and shortened the transport time from 3 days to 10 hours. Besides, the establishment of the East African Free Trade Agreement (FTA) at Djibouti by the Chinese government to facilitate trade in the region. Cumulatively, the BRI contributes to the growth of trade and investment opportunities for landlocked Ethiopia in terms of financing, infrastructure development and regional integration.
The internationalization of the renminbi (RMB) raises important questions concerning dynamics of transformation within the post-crisis global monetary order. International political economists have predominantly analysed the currency’s cross-border evolution as a consequence of China’s macroeconomic conditions, domestic politics, and currency statecraft within a broader framework of international monetary hierarchy. In this article, we draw upon insights from financial geography to rethink the rise of the RMB as a process of transnational market-making involving actors and political agency across distinctive scales. We develop a multi-scalar framework that illuminates the distinctive agency of London and Hong Kong in this process, conceptualizing it as a form of subnational infrastructural power that facilitates financial market-making in concert with (and despite) dynamics of interstate geopolitics. This goes some way in remedying the scalar deficiency of existing theories of political economy of international money, as well as integrating considerations of power and political agency into financial geography perspectives. Empirically, we trace how the unique development of London’s offshore RMB market reflects this interplay between private financial actors, municipal-level authorities, and national political priorities. Finally, we discuss how IFC-led market-making relates to system-level dynamics by both facilitating ‘tipping points’ in global monetary change, as well as diluting national monetary power.
“China’s involvement in Africa has become one of the most discussed topics in contemporary International Relations, with tags such as ‘genuine friendship,’ and ‘new set of brutal colonizers,’ being presented with equal strengths of logic. Against the background of the catalogue of interest generated by the country’s involvement in Africa; this is a most welcome addition to literature by two of Africa’s foremost scholars of International Relations.”
—Abiodun Alao, Professor and Program Director, African Leadership Centre, School of Global Affairs, King’s College, London, UK
“This is truly compelling and scholarly analysis of the interface between China and Africa. Well researched, balanced and penetrating, the volume takes the reader through the economic and political implications of relations between China and Africa. This is a timely, detailed, consistent and competent take on a theme that has become highly strategic in our time.”
—Ezra Chitando, Professor, Global Relations, History and Religion, University of Zimbabwe and Zimbabwe National Defence University, Zimbabwe
This book examines China’s political, economic, and diplomatic engagement in Africa. The rapid increase of China’s economic and political involvement in Africa is the most momentous development on the continent of Africa since the beginning of the twenty-first century. China is now Africa’s largest trading partner and the largest infrastructure financier. Additionally, it is the fastest growing economy and source of foreign direct investment. This monograph seeks to understand the dynamics of the escalating Chinese investments in African economies and the political implications of this development for Africa. This work will interest scholars, students, academics, and policy makers on the fields of Chinese and African politics, development studies, and international political economy.
Olayiwola Abegunrin is Professor of International Relations, African Studies, and Political Economy at Howard University and the University of Maryland, USA.
Charity Manyeruke is Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Zimbabwe, Harare, Zimbabwe.
This paper revisits the international relations approach to structural power. In particular, it stresses the influence of international regimes, institutions and international law, on current understandings of structural power. The new approach broadens conceptions that see structural power solely as constraints; structures not only reflect the capabilities of actors that created them, but also generate new capabilities. The institutional context and viewing the ‘structure’ through the prism of international regime theory enables us to resolve conceptual issues that eluded classic scholars such as Waltz and Strange; and allows a more pluralistic view of actors' interactions in the international system.
China's ties with Africa are evolving into a multi-faceted relationship of increasing complexity. After nearly two decades of debt-financed infrastructure development, Beijing's exposure to African debt is reaching disquieting proportions with an estimated US$132 billion owed to China in 2016. Managing this new role as Africa's creditor poses uncomfortable questions for creditor and debtor alike. Concurrently, the quiet surge of Chinese investment in manufacturing in Africa is transforming local economies in ways that are beginning to alter the continent's position within the global economy. Finally, the proliferation of Chinese businesses and migrants across Africa is inspiring greater Chinese involvement in UN peacekeeping and private security initiatives.
This article examines how these structural changes are challenging core practices and principles which guided China–Africa relations in its formative decades. For instance, under the banner of an alternative to western policies China promoted the absence of conditionalities attached to its concessional loans and grants. Equally, promotion of industrialization of African economies marks a key shift away from China's resource-centric engagement with the continent. And, in the case of security, Beijing's commitment to avoid intervention in domestic affairs is being set aside with implications for its principles, and ultimately status, in Africa.
China’s “One Belt, One Road” project is comprised of two components: the Maritime Silk Road Initiative (MSRI) and the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB)—that were announced separately in 2013. Each component has the potential to transform the global geopolitical landscape through the construction of interrelated infrastructure projects including ports, highways, railways and pipelines. Such hard infrastructure requires the complementary construction of soft infrastructure, such as free trade and investment agreements, and other accords. We introduce a special section focusing specifically on the geopolitics of the MSRI that stems from a workshop hosted in November 2015 in Shanghai. The origins, scope and content of the MSRI are described, along with a summary of the current literature discussing the project, and dominant geopolitical representations. The MSRI is a geopolitical project that involves a number of actors (governments, private companies and Chinese state-owned enterprises) at a number of geographic scales (cities, provinces, states and continents). Arrghi’s twin logics of territorial and economic power help frame and connect the papers of the special section to illustrate the complexity and dynamism of the geopolitics of the MSRI. The articles provide insights into the geopolitics of a large connectivity project.
The ‘One Belt, One Road’ (OBOR) initiatives form the centerpiece of the Chinese leadership’s new foreign policy. The OBOR initiatives are a reflection of China’s ascendance in the global arena, economically, politically, and strategically. Developing inter-connectivity of infrastructure development forms a central part of China’s OBOR initiatives. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) aims to facilitate and accelerate infrastructure improvement in the region by providing capital loans and technical services. The AIIB will serve as the spearhead of China’s OBOR initiatives. The AIIB and OBOR initiatives have put China at the center of geoeconomics and geopolitics in the region and beyond, a position from which it hopes to strengthen its economic ties with other Asian countries. The new Silk Road initiatives also provide a channel for Chinese companies and capital to invest in other countries by leveraging China’s strengths in infrastructure development, financial power and manufacturing capacity. The OBOR initiatives and the AIIB could change the economic and political landscape of Asia, the most dynamic and economically vibrant region of the twenty-first century. However, China faces serious challenges, both internally and externally, in implementing these initiatives.
As the United States' relative power declines, will the open and rule-based liberal international order Washington has championed since the 1940s start to erode? Probably not. That order is alive and well. China and other emerging powers will not seek to undermine the system; instead, they will try to gain more leadership within it.
The end of the Cold War was a "big bang" reminiscent of earlier moments after major wars, such as the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the end of the World Wars in 1919 and 1945. Here John Ikenberry asks the question, what do states that win wars do with their newfound power and how do they use it to build order? In examining the postwar settlements in modern history, he argues that powerful countries do seek to build stable and cooperative relations, but the type of order that emerges hinges on their ability to make commitments and restrain power. The author explains that only with the spread of democracy in the twentieth century and the innovative use of international institutions--both linked to the emergence of the United States as a world power--has order been created that goes beyond balance of power politics to exhibit "constitutional" characteristics. The open character of the American polity and a web of multilateral institutions allow the United States to exercise strategic restraint and establish stable relations among the industrial democracies despite rapid shifts and extreme disparities in power. Blending comparative politics with international relations, and history with theory, After Victory will be of interest to anyone concerned with the organization of world order, the role of institutions in world politics, and the lessons of past postwar settlements for today. It also speaks to today's debate over the ability of the United States to lead in an era of unipolar power.
Whilst numerous accounts claim that the continent is on the rise, driven by high growth rates and supposed better governance and economic policies, Africa's dependent position in the global economy is being reified. This article seeks to analyse the dynamics which are accompanying a notional ‘rise’ of Africa but which are actually contributing to the continent being pushed further and further into underdevelopment and dependency. It calls into question the superficial accounts of a continent on the move or that declare that the continent has somehow turned a definitive page in its history. A ‘rise’ based on an intensification of resource extraction whilst dependency deepens, inequality increases and de-industrialisation continues apace, cannot be taken seriously. A model based on growth-for-growth's sake has replaced development and the agenda of industrialisation and moving Africa up the global production chain has been discarded. Instead, Africa's current ‘comparative advantage’ as a primary commodity exporter is celebrated and reinforced. History repeats itself.
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.
For the first time since the era of the slave trade, African trade is arguably re-orienting from the “Global North” to the “Global East.” Chinese investment and trade with Africa is rising quickly. At the same time, the U.S. has increased its strategic engagement with Africa very significantly since the terrorist attacks of 2001. As a consequence of this, the continent has moved centre stage in global oil and security politics. This paper investigates the nature of Chinese and American investment and trade in Africa; the ways in which these governments view the continent, and explores the economic and political impacts of enhanced geo-economic competition between the West and the East there. It finds that current trends are reworking the colonial trade structure, strengthening authoritarian states, and fuelling conflict. However, there are also progressive dimensions to the current conjuncture which could be built on with more robust international coordination and action.
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