African Engagements

With the end of the Cold War, the world seemed to move from a bipolar to a unipolar system, with the neoliberal West globally imposing its laws. However, it has been acknowledged that other actors, such as China, India and Brazil, have become increasingly influential, helping to lead to a new multipolarity at the global level. The question of what this emerging multipolarity means for Africa is important. Will Africa become crushed in a mounting struggle over raw materials and political hegemony between superpowers and fall victim to a new scramble for Africa? Or does this new historic conjuncture offer African countries and groups greater room for negotiation and manoeuvring, eventually leading to stronger democracy and enhanced growth? The chapters in this volume offer food for thought on how Africa’s engagements with the world are currently being reshaped and revalued, and, importantly—on whose terms?

Ton Dietz is Director of the African Studies Centre and Professor of African Development at Leiden University and Professor of Human Geography at the University of Amsterdam. He recently published Silverlining Africa, his inaugural lecture at Leiden University (2011).

Kjell Havnevik is Senior Researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, and Professor at the University of Agder, Norway. His most recent book is Biofuels, Land Grabbing and Food Security in Africa, edited with Prosper Matondi and Atakilte Beyene (Zed Books 2011).

Mayke Kaag is Researcher at the African Studies Centre in Leiden and Assistant Professor of International Development Studies at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on African transnational relations, including engagements with the diaspora and transnational Islamic NGOs.

Terje Oestigaard is Researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, Sweden. His particular research interests are water studies in the past and present and the archaeology of religion.

'The concerns in question, which synergize quite smoothly, focus on emergent socio-economic and political trends in Africa, the impact of rising global powers on these trends, and the role of African agency in all of this. The pointed focus on African agency within the ambit of a multipolar world carves a special attention niche for this work. As the editors aver in their introduction, ‘by taking multipolarity as the central focus and by highlighting the agency of Africa in co-shaping the new global world order, while also adopting a historically sensitive
approach, this book serves to document and analyse new developments’ (p. 6). They may claim a success that other works on this subject (a virtual industry given the topicality of the issues) have generally failed to pull off. The literature in recent times on Africa/China-India-Brazil relations has tended to cast Africa, in a very unsophisticated manner, as a puerile, languid, and bat-blind geopolitical and economic entity, both unwilling and incapable of protecting and pursuing her interests. This book contests such a view trenchantly and underscores the varying
ways in which Africa’s peoples in business, civil society, and government are navigating the new architecture of global power relations on and outside the African continent..........A must-read, certainly'.

Lloyd Amoah, Ashesi University, in 'African Affairs', July 2012