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/328/ The New Scramble for Africa
🕑 Added 2023-03-21 17:09:00 +0000 UTCOn geopolitical competition over Africa.
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In light of the 'new Cold War', we look at what the US, Europe, Russia and China's respective "pitches" are to African countries – what are they selling? And we examine the factors that contribute to Africa's place in geopolitics today: Chinese hunger for raw materials, the global war on terror, the green energy transition, drug and people smuggling, and more.
If the original Scramble for Africa (1884-1914) was driven by an attempt to displace European class war onto another terrain, can we say anything analogous is happening today?
Links:
- /303/ The Failure of the French Forever War ft. Yvan Guichaoua
- /304/ The Failure of the French Forever War (2) ft. Yvan Guichaoua
- Russia in Africa, Financial Times series of articles
- Defending Our Sovereignty: US Military Bases in Africa and the Future of African Unity, Tricontinental Institute
- Italophone Somalia, Then and Now, Iman Mohamed, The Drift
- Emmanuel Macron must reset France’s Africa policy, Sylvie Kauffman (Le Monde editor), FT
- Debunking the Myth of ‘Debt-trap Diplomacy’, Lee Jones & Shahar Hameiri, Chatham House
- Let’s talk about neo-colonialism in Africa, Mark Langan, LSE blog
- /267/ South Africa Mafia State ft. Benjamin Fogel
Comments
Nathan Beesley
I imagine I'm in the minority here, but as a loyal Bungacast Patron and a confirmed member of the Church of England, I feel very attacked.
jkjkjkj
Phil asked for the domestic portion of political coalitions invested in African interventionism and I think the answer is actually fairly boring: every western society has a certain percentage of its electorate that is ideologically interventionist and neoconservative. These voters are typically very fickle and care about foreign policy basically to the exclusion of all other issues (as a result they tend to be quite culturally and economically flexible), but they will absolutely swing and flip based on foreign policy views. That exact figure is hard to quantify, but at least in the us it’s substantial enough that the Republican to Democrat neocon Pipeline that was accelerated under trump was significant enough to Democrats to bother pursuing, particularly given that most voters care very little about foreign policy and won’t change their votes based off of it.
