Africa and the Formation of the New System of International Relations

The year 1960 marked the moment when the number of nominally independent African countries on the continent rose from nine to twenty-six, and is a symbolic indicator of when Africa began to emerge from the days of European colonisation. However, from the beginning, very few of Africa’s leaders sought to reorganise the continent’s economic structures and did virtually nothing to question its external exchange relations. Preferring to play the role of compradors, most preferred to stay wedded to their former colonial masters. Consequently, 60 years after the ‘Year of Africa’, most African countries continue to be entrenched in a set of connections that fit well with Kwame Nkrumah’s description of neo-colonialism. This neo-colonialism has a highly resilient material base which continues to maintain the continent in its subordinate global status and which perpetuates its underdevelopment. Sustainable growth and development in Africa continues to be blocked by the domination of external economies. African countries remain constrained from accumulating the necessary capital for auto-centric growth since the surplus is transferred overseas. Asymmetrical economic relationships are embodied by the continued supremacy of the core over Africa, something intrinsic to capitalism. Unequal exchange, the transfer of surplus, i.e. the continued looting of Africa by its elites and their foreign associates, means that the dreams and aspirations of 1960, for the majority of Africans at least, have been frustrated.

The process of gaining independence in Africa was accompanied by the intensified colonial liberation movements, elite struggle for power, and the formation of new state borders. Having received formal sovereignty, African countries faced the challenge of building their own identity. However, most metropoles continued to actively intervene in the affairs of the former colonies under the pretext of assisting them in state-building, forming of the economic and military systems. Therefore, metropoles managed to subsequently control development process. A new type of colonialism was launched, characterized by a low level of predictability and foresight. This trends mainly fit with neo-patrimonialism, which focuses on the legitimacy search and artificial statehood creation. The emergence of a new African political elite in the postcolonial period, formed at the expense of the army and senior military officials, was accompanied by the search for an effective development path and attempts to assure a fragile balance between tradition and modernization. This served to aggravate economic, and then political dependence of African states on global economic institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. One of the key challenges of the postcolonial period in Africa is the blurring of borders and, as a consequence, the rise of ethno-religious problems. Attempts to resolve this kind of threats lead to the intervention of both intra-regional non-state actors and external powers.

The rise of the anti-colonial movement had a direct and visible impact on the international system in the 1960s. Brazil’s anti-colonial position seemed to be rather contradictory: on one hand, the country supported the draft “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples,” but at the same time spoke up for the Portuguese colonial policy in preserving its colonies by emphasizing the “civilizing mission,” as well as for the French one in case of Tunisia and Algeria. The famous Brazilian diplomat and chancellor A. Castro sought to make the country’s position more consistent. In his speeches, he firmly rejected the legitimacy of any type of colonialism, defended the need to accelerate decolonization, and heavily criticized the position of Portugal in Africa. His speech at the UN on 3 “D”—disarmament, development, and decolonization, reflected the complex strategy. A. Castro believed that Brazil’s position should be opened and objective in order to gain the African support, while its support of Portugal would have negative consequences for Brazil. He sought rapprochement with African delegations, condemned apartheid, and emphasized the deep historical ties between Brazil and Africa. A. Castro led Brazilian delegation to set up UNCTAD to protect interests of developing countries. In 1974, Brazil recognized the independence of former Portuguese colonies, developed relations with Black Africa, and condemned the apartheid regime in South Africa. It was the doctrinal concepts of A. Castro that played an important role in the formation of country’s position on the issue of colonialism and development.

Drawing on declassified documents housed in the Russian Federation Archives of Foreign Policy (Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rosssiyiskoi Federatsii, AVP RF) and the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (Rossiyiskiyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveisheyi istorii, RGANI), the details of a secret 1963 mission of Soviet experts to Ghana, and its political consequences are investigated. The purpose of the mission was to elaborate constituent documents of the Union of African States, which the Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah sought to create. Thus, Professor Vladimir Ya. Aboltin was tasked to design an economic program of the Union. He advanced the idea of establishing a Pan-African Customs Union and the Central African Bank which would issue a common currency. He also proposed to industrialize Africa and to work out the intra-African infrastructure projects, as well as to develop Sahara gradually. Aboltin believed that the way he chartered for African economic integration would “weaken the overall position of imperialism, which employs new forms of colonialism in Africa.” On his return to Moscow, Aboltin submitted a comprehensive secret memo “On Pan-Africanism” to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CC CPSU). Pan-Africanism was defined as an “ideology, racist in its basis, not compatible with Marxism-Leninism,” an “utopia divorced from reality.” He advised the Soviet leadership not to treat pan-Africanists as reliable allies, even if they declared a socialist path of development, including Nkrumah whose conception of Nkrumaism was “a mixture of all sorts of things.” Given Aboltin’s assessment, the Soviet leaders reacted with restraint to the May 1965 request of the Ghanaian Minister of Foreign Affairs Kojo Botsio to allocate 300 million pounds to his country for “the struggle to achieve inter-African unity based on socialist principles.”

The role of Africa as a geostrategically vital region is steadily growing. The leading states and economic centers of power, the United States (US), the European Union (EU), People’s Republic of China (PRC), and the Russian Federation (RF), clearly realize the high importance of the resource, human, and growing economic potential of Africa in the transition from the monopolar world order of the beginning of the century towards other possible configurations—bipolarity or multipolarity. As a result, the states claiming to be significant actors in the world arena or important forces in the future world economy, increased their ideological, economic, and military–political expansion into this actively transforming region with a huge potential. The coronavirus pandemic and the global economic crisis certainly added some new elements to the global and regional African strategies of the leading states. The new African strategies adopted by each of the four heavyweights of the global politics, as well as their economic, military, and strategic rivalry on and around the African continent should be compared in order to identify similarities and differences, irreconcilable contradictions, and possible constructive interactions. In the context of the emerging global bipolarity, the strategies of the USA and China represent antagonistic programs based on fundamentally different initial messages. In the case of the US, the line is to deter by denial the spread of the competitor’s influence using tough policies, including forceful (while not necessarily military) confrontational actions, like sanctions and trade wars. The Chinese strategy seeks, while resorting to minimal direct confrontation possible, to neutralize the US–EU obstruction to Beijing’s expansion on the continent and its freedom of interaction with partners in Africa. The Russian and EU African strategies are more passive and retroactive. The interests of those power centers are not intrinsically antagonistic, but having reconciled themselves to the role of the second in the bipolar combat formation, the two actors would not cooperate but rather snatch from each other the bits and pieces remaining from the scramble of the hegemons.

In contrast to the previous and still existing skeptical and even arrogant approach to assessing the quality of Russia’s economic cooperation with Africa, a new strategy is being advanced, considering the window of opportunities opened by the dynamic nature of the rapidly developing African economies. The current Russian strategies of economic development have been employing the opportunities given by engagement with Africa for the purposes of the recovery and diversification of the domestic manufacturing, the construction industry, the infrastructure, and the services sector to rather a very limited extent. Meanwhile, the African track opens a window of opportunity to restore and boost industries other than of primary sector in Russia, as well as to sharpen skills and upgrade mechanisms of penetration into highly competitive developed and transition economies.

Economic growth rates above much of the rest of the world for a decade and a half led some analysts and commentators to develop or adopt an “Africa Rising” discourse. This discourse presents Africa as an emerging global economic and political power. While the Africa Rising discourse is problematic, we argue that it does reflect the emergence of a number of world powers from the Global South, particularly China—a kind of “shadow rise”, which may nonetheless have led to the concomitant increase in the economic and political power of local elites and domestic “middle classes” across a number of African countries. This paper seeks to break open the black box of the power relations and economic impacts of China in Southern Africa and relate it to the concept of “Africa Rising”. In particular, it explores the extent to which China has empowered different local actors and whether or not they have contributed to the diversification of local economies.

Africa as a store-room of natural resources and the continent of intensive growth attracts the greater attention of China. Africa is also of growing interest for China as a strategic node in the maritime portion of the “One Belt One Road” initiative, which takes the central place in Chinese foreign strategy. The inclusion into Chinese projects gives Africa financial resources and opportunities to use them for the sake of sustainable development. China’s African policy is presented through comparative and system analyses, using the principle of historicism. The strategic directions of interaction between China and Africa are theoretically justified. Beijing acts mainly as a donor and investor for the continent. Special attention is given to China’s contribution to the economic potential of Africa through the realization of transport mega-projects and the establishment of the industrial base. China’s “soft power”, dedicated to counteract “China’s menace” theory and to improve China’s image on the continent, plays an important role in China’s policy. China pays keen attention to the problems of African security as to the necessary condition of sustainable development. Special attention is focused on the peculiarities of China-Africa cooperation in resolving the security and development problems of Africa. African conflicts and terrorism present a real threat for China, as Chinese companies often become a target. The objective analysis of China’s interaction with African countries demonstrates the positive results of this interaction for Africa. China-Africa contemporary cooperation contributes to resolving such key African problems as security and development.

The Southern African Development Community countries are grappling with the complex problem of Chinese state and corporate involvement in divergent societies, politics, economies and ecologies. There is enormous concern rising now about these relationships, in part because of the continuation of the new Cold War between Beijing and Washington, leaving Southern Africa torn, divided and subject to new forms of exploitation. After centuries of slavery, colonialism and imperialism, a degree of political ‘independence’ was won between the 1960-1990s, with a terrible loss of life due to white supremicism. But since then, the region has still suffered: from neo-colonialism, inter-imperial rivalries, sub-imperialism, neoliberalism, sustained patriarchy, resource-looting and now also the global climate meltdown and differential access to Covid-19 treatment and vaccines. China’s role is often an amplifier of these forms of oppression, but not always. It is vital to distinguish between functions that may assist the region in autonomous, sovereign self-development, on the one hand, and those that have negative implications for the region’s relationship to the world economy on the other. Social activists often provide guidelines to help make these distinctions.

For most of its history, China has been the center of the East Asian system of interstate relations. After a period of “one hundred years of humiliation” (1840–1949), the first 60 years of the PRC (1949–2009), and the World financial crisis in 2008, China regained the status of the center of the international system and the world economy. The foreign policy of both ancient and modern China is based on the principles of egocentrism and a global network of partnerships. Particular attention has always been paid to the border countries surrounding China, from which a real threat to the existence of the state could come. Other countries—the farther they were from China, the less they were interested in it. In the twenty-first century, with the advent of Xi Jinping, China began to pursue the diplomacy of great power and put forward the principle of China’s core national interests, as well as normative requirements for establishing and developing relations with other countries. The priorities of China’s foreign policy today look like this: the U.S., Russia, neighboring countries, great powers, and only then developing countries (Asia, Latin America, and Africa). A comparative analysis and a systematic approach demonstrate that Africa now is at the very periphery of China’s foreign policy, although in 2018 direct investment in Africa in the amount of $ 200 billion already exceeded China’s investment in the U.S., which reached $ 150 billion. However, the U.S., the EU, and ASEAN countries occupy first, second, and third place in China’s foreign trade. Africa is more interested in China as a political ally—54 votes in the UN are an essential resource of Chinese diplomacy. The author concludes that China’s foreign policy is a dichotomy between geoeconomic, where China, as a developed power, is at the center of the world economy together with developed/western countries, and geopolitics, in which Beijing positions itself as a developing country that it has not been for a long time, together with other countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

Africa continues to suffer from outbreaks of conflict, with evidence pointing to an increasing number of violent armed incidents. The establishment of the African Union (AU) heralded (or so it was hoped) a new era in how African conflicts are managed and resolved. Since 2003, the AU has mandated a number of peace support operations including the African Union Mission in Burundi (AMIB), the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS), and the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), as a means to manage conflicts on the continent. In more recent times, the organization has also authorized three operations dealing with non-state armed groups namely the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), Boko Haram and the Sahel Region Jihadists. Whilst some of these peace support missions recorded successes in meeting their mandates, generally all of them faced or are facing a number of challenges including funding, and logistical inadequacies among others. At the same time, the AU’s engagement in peacekeeping in Africa has occasioned opportunities for the organization including: increasing its capacity building in the area of conflict prevention, management and resolution; adoption of initiatives like “Silencing the Guns” aimed at lessening the outbreak of conflicts; and establishing its own funding mechanisms on how to support its mandated and authorized peace support missions among others.

Peacekeeping and economic union are the two most important dimensions of African integration. The first section of this paper aims to analyse some current challenges to African peacekeeping, peacemaking, and African integration. The continuing Libyan civil war epitomizes the diplomatic stalemates and military stalemates which form the limits of current African peacekeeping. It exposes the North African Regional Capability and North African Standby Brigade as paper structures that do not exist operationally, and so limit the capacity of the African Union’s Peace and Security Council. The military intervention of states outside Africa can polarize conflicts and escalate civil wars. Africa’s colonial epoch serves as a warning of the potential dangers of foreign military bases in Africa. In parts of West Africa, states sub-contract peacemaking and anti-terrorist operations to unsupervised local militias, which are lawless at best, and commit ethnic killings at worst. African integration fares better in the economic dimension. The second section analyses African integration, with its focus on the most recent step of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), which starts to lay the cornerstone envisaged four decades ago in the Lagos Plan of Action, and three decades ago in the Abuja Treaty for an African Economic Community. The historic track record of African continental organizations indicates that a decade will be a realistic minimum period for it to be substantially implemented. The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System will help operationalize the AfCFTA by lowering forex currency transaction charges. Severe difficulties can be predicted for future attempts to upgrade the AfCFTA into a continental customs union, and ultimately into a continental common market.

Since the early 1990s, mediation, peacemaking and peacekeeping have come to occupy an increasingly important place in international relations due to the general trend towards the abandonment of the principle of non-interference in domestic conflicts amid the post-Cold War détente. Another major trend has been the growing role of regional organizations in the sphere of conflict prevention and resolution. Africa remains the leading continent in terms of the number of countries affected by armed conflicts and post-conflict situations. In particular, the Greater Horn of Africa (GHA) has experienced three civil wars in the past few decades—in Sudan, Somalia and South Sudan. IGAD has become one of the most prominent regional communities of the African Union in terms of conflict resolution due to its vital role as a mediator and peacekeeper in the three aforementioned countries. The present study seeks to analyze IGAD’s strengths and weaknesses and make conclusions regarding the potential of its peace and security dimension. Methodologically, the study draws on primary and secondary (scholarly and media) sources to identify and analyze fundamental processes and forces of change within the overarching paradigms of international relations and conflict resolution. The author comes to the conclusion that IGAD has significantly enhanced its potential in the area of conflict resolution since the 1990s and established itself as the leading actor in this field in East Africa, yet internal contradictions erode its effectiveness and may preclude the formation of a robust standby mechanism for peace enforcement in the region.

Increasing the proportion of women in uniform in the peacekeeping operations (PO) is recognized by UN member-states as a necessary and desirable goal prompted by a number of factors, such as: a more gender-balanced peacekeeping force is able to improve operational effectiveness and is also able to let the PO significantly enhance the achievement of the goals set out in the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. Despite the 20 years of international and regional efforts to increase the number and active involvement of women in peacekeeping, the number of women engaged in peacekeeping operations in Africa still remains low. This problem is affected by a number of factors, starting with gender stereotypes and ending with insufficient consideration of women’s participation in peacekeeping at the country level. The main purpose of the article is to analyse the main trends in the participation of women from African countries in peacekeeping, dwell on the problems of increasing the number of such women and identify the obstacles in this path. As a result, promoting the WPS agenda and implementing initiatives of the UN Resolution 1325 would be much easier with the guidance and advice provided to the member-states by the UN, the AU and the non-governmental organizations working in the sphere of peacekeeping.

General population growth and an increase in the number of farmers, environmental degradation, disruption of conditions for resolving land and water disputes, and the proliferation of Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) in the Sahel and West Africa have exacerbated the struggle for the survival and security of economic livelihoods, and in particular negatively affected relationships between shepherds and farmers in several communities in Africa. This kind of conflict between farmers and herdsmen mainly applies to Nigeria, but is also present in other African countries, especially in Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, Senegal, Cameroon, and Côte d’Ivoire. Such conflicts are not triggered by a single reason, but are driven by a set of multi-causal factors, such as scarce resources in the face of greater need, reprisal attacks, land and climate change, etc. Obviously, in case of Nigeria these kinds of conflicts have a disintegrative impact, as they lead to inimical effects to the country’s unity. The need for fostering value reorientation and restoring earlier interactive ties between herdsmen and farmers seems vital today so that Nigerians can learn to appreciate the values that unite them more than those that separate the society.

In this paper, the author distinguishes between the language of centeredness and the less precise language of de-centeredness in relation to culture and economics. Historical and political de-centeredness takes Africans from the center to the margins in their own narratives; this is a danger for any analysis. Thus, Molefi Asante seeks an analytic Afrocentricity where it is possible to anticipate through sentinel statements the social and political intentions of those who write about African issues. This construction is a response to the continuing issue of an African intellectual world where Africans are not even the subjects in their own realities. Asante argues that this situation can be overcome by a re-orientation of African studies in such a way that partnering rather than hierarchy becomes the fundamental means of investigating and analyzing social, political, and economic issues in Africa.

Afrocentrism which emerged as a response to Eurocentrism challenged several political theories of the twentieth century which are used to define the problem field of international studies. This phenomenon as well as the West–East opposition that emerged in European countries many years ago gave birth to a whole trend in the sphere of human knowledge which intentionally opposed the original African foreign policy thought to classical ideas. Using the method of axiological reductionism based on Husserlian εποχη principle and Quine’s ontological relativism the authors explore the ethical features of the original African foreign policy concepts. Having established that the ethical component of African political thought has no fundamental differences from similar components of other regions of the world, the authors show the axiological commonality of African and world theories and introduce into accepted typological classifications them through axiological reductionism. As a result, the authors conclude that, despite the prominent specificity of the concepts themselves (for example, racial—negritude, afrocentric—concentric ring system, regional—Pan-Africanism, state—Ujamaa) and the foreign policy doctrines (African Renaissance) and phenomena (OAU, AU) generated by them, African political thought not only does not fall out of the global mainstream of political studies but also complements it as one of the significant components of global political development.

Using the results of the 2017–2018 survey of international scholars from nine countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia draws preliminary conclusions about the dominant theoretical approaches in the African international studies academic community. The authors further elaborate on the prospects for conceptualizing African approaches to international relations through the prism of each of the theories outlined. Particular attention is paid to critical theories, especially neo-Marxism in its various interpretations. A special focus is placed on the growing intellectual competition between Western critical thought and critical directions that are widespread in Russia and China. A particular difference in this regard lies in the perception of China’s role in Africa. The authors also question the non-Western nature of postcolonial theories and address the difficult dilemma faced by African international studies scholars—to leave their home country for leading Western universities and receive modern education in international relations, partially breaking away from their roots, or to remain patriotic to their country but stay excluded from international academic discourse. Finally, the article examines the issue of reparations for years of slavery as one of the radical ideological foundations of African IR studies.

Theory in international relations has majorly been discussed in the context of the Western experience of IR. Through the development of the discipline, non-Western theories have gained traction and credibility due to the increasing acknowledgment that the international system is dynamic and ever-changing. The focus of this paper is to provide an African worldview on international relations within the context of theory, as well as an analysis of great and emerging power interaction in Africa. The paper will look at traditional theories while highlighting the ideological contributions made from an African perspective. The analysis was drawn from the African colonial and post-colonial experiences, as well as the pre- and post-COVID-19 context of international relations from an African worldview. The underlying theme in the discourse of the IR of African states has been that of solidarity and unity. Through the African Union, there have been attempts aimed at achieving a borderless Africa through an elaborate integration process that is multi-dimensional. The key drawback has been the challenges posed by domestic counterforces that prevent the full achievement of national unity. Despite this, it is imperative for African states to develop a contextual worldview through which they can navigate the international system which is both dynamic and uncertain. This uncertainty is acerbated by the presence of political anarchy and power hierarchy globally.

African agency is a complex multi-aspect phenomenon. It evolves with time and within the framework of interaction between Africa and its international partners, one of which is the EU. Struggling with numerous challenges, African agency strengthens as role of Africa on the global stage grows. Africa still encounters structural constraints because of global economic and political inequalities. However, it strives to increase its representation and role in the institutions and forums of the global governance. The article attempts to give an overview of the evolution of African agency in its current relations with the European Union, on political, economic and social levels. It also analyses prospects of Africa projecting its agency to find new, better place in the structure of the global governance and internal/external factors affecting this process.

It has become evident that the current socio-economic order is increasingly dependent on information and communication technologies (ICT). The creation of the knowledge-based economy is turning into the strategic priority of the policy of every state. The trend also reflects the Sub-Saharan African countries’ strategy, even if they do not have an appropriate financial and technological base. This factor explains the fact that these countries, in order to ensure the quick development of their ICT sector, still rely on the financial and technological aid of their more developed Western partners. This situation puts the African information and communication space in a mostly dependent position on non-African investments and technologies and threatens the information sovereignty of African countries. Based on case studies of different states of Sub-Saharan Africa, the author thoroughly examines the measures that have been undertaken by African countries to strengthen their information sovereignty and ensure their equal integration into the global information and communication space.