Marcus Power

New African Choices? The Politics of Chinese Engagement

The role of China in Africa must be understood in the context of competing and intensified global energy politics, in which the US, India and China are among the key players vying for security of supply. Contrary to popular representation, Chinas role in Africa is much more than this however, opening up new choices for African development for the first time since the neo-liberal turn of the 1980s. As such it is important to start by disaggregating ‘China’ and ‘Africa’ since neither represents a coherent and uniform set of motivations and opportunities. This points to the need for, at minimum, a comparative case study approach which highlights the different agendas operating in different African states. It also requires taking a longue durée perspective since China-Africa relations are long standing and recent intervention builds on cold war solidarities, in polemic at least. It also forces us to consider Chinese involvement in Africa as ambivalent, but contextual. Here we look at the political dimensions of this engagement and set out a research agenda that focuses on class and racial dynamics, state restructuring, party politics, civil society responses and aid effectiveness.

The Degeneration of Tropical Geography

Abstract How did colonial and tropical geography as practiced in the aftermath of World War II become development geography by the 1970s? We excavate the genealogy of development geography, relating it to geopolitical, economic, and social traumas of decolonization. We examine how revolutionary pressures and insurgencies, coupled with the eclipse of formal colonialism, led to the degeneration and displacement of a particular way of writing geographical difference of “the tropics.” A key objective here is to complicate and enrich understandings of paradigmatic shifts and epistemological transitions, and to elaborate archaeologies of development knowledges and their association with geography. While interested in such a big picture, we also approach this story in part through engagements with the works of a series of geographers whose scholarship and teaching took them to the tropics, among them Keith Buchanan, a pioneering radical geographer trained at the School of Geography of the University of Birmingham, England, who later worked in South Africa, Nigeria, London, Singapore (as an external examiner), and Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Towards a critical political geography of African development

Abstract In this paper we aim to rethink the political geography of African development at the beginning of the 21st century. Central to our thesis are two intertwining legacies, paralleling Edward Said’s Orientalism. The first is the construction of Africa in the western imagination and the second is an enduring trusteeship towards the continent. The core movement we seek to critique and move beyond is the complicity between racialised knowledges about Africa and a series of political interventions that seek to ‘help’ Africans to develop. The paper begins by examining the legacy of colonialism in the policies towards and representations of Africa. Although selective and schematic we argue that what unites these power–knowledge constructions is a sense of trusteeship towards the continent. The next step is to look at ways of decolonising our knowledges as a means to effect more appropriate political engagement with Africa. For this we touch on a range of theoretical positions, but look most closely at the corpus of post-colonial theory for ways of doing this. While not uncritical of post-colonialism we find it potentially useful for destabilising western authority and in addressing questions of popular agency and cultural constructions of exclusion. From here we attempt a reformulation which addresses the role of the state, the politics of place and space, and the ways in which ‘we’––professional geographers––might go about our work.

Towards a Critical Geopolitics of China's Engagement with African Development

China, in its quest for a closer strategic partnership with Africa, has increasingly dynamic economic, political and diplomatic activities on the continent. Chinese leaders and strategists believe that Chinas historical experience and vision of economic development resonates powerfully with African counterparts and that the long-standing history of friendly political linkages and development co-operation offers a durable foundation for future partnership. Both in China and amongst some Western commentators a form of exceptionalism and generalisation regarding both China and Africa has been emerging. In this article instead we seek to develop theoretical tools for examining China as a geopolitical and geoeconomic actor that is both different and similar to other industrial powers intervening in Africa. This is premised on a political economy approach that ties together material interests with a deconstruction of the discursive or ‘extra-economic’ ways by which Chinese capitalism internationalises. From there we use this framework to analyse contemporary Chinese engagement in Africa. We examine the changing historical position of Africa within Beijings foreign policy strategy and Chinas vision of the evolving international political system, looking in particular at Chinas bilateral and state-centric approach to working with African ‘partners’. Chinese practice is uncomfortable and unfamiliar with the notion of ‘development’ as an independent policy field of the kind that emerged among Western nations in the course of the 1950s and increasingly China has come to be viewed as a ‘rogue creditor’ and a threat to the international aid industry. Rather than highlighting one strand of Chinese relations with African states (such as aid or governance) we propose here that it is necessary to critically reflect on the wider geopolitics of China-Africa relations (past and present) in order to understand how China is opening up new ‘choices’ and altering the playing field for African development for the first time since the neo-liberal turn of the 1980s.

‘The Tears of Portugal’: Empire, Identity, ‘Race’, and Destiny in Portuguese Geopolitical Narratives

Geopolitical discourses are constitutive moments within the expression and construction of ‘national’ identities. Approaching geopolitics and identities as contested and fluid domains, we examine the relationships between geopolitical narratives and visions of Portugueseness (Portugalidade). The focus is on the frames of geopolitical thought developed in 20th-century Portugal, with particular reference to the post-1945 period and with some consideration of the transformations since 1974 accompanying the collapse of what was both the first and the most enduring European overseas empire. This study of Portuguese geopolitical discourses leads to a conclusion in which we reflect on the significance of relations between the ‘colonial’ and the ‘postcolonial’ and the articulations of East–West and North–South in geopolitical discourses. This permits wider critique concerning the location of geopolitics within 20th-century and contemporary imperialisms.

Frames of Reference on the Geopolitical Stage: Saving Private Ryan and the Second World War/Second Gulf War Intertext

As sequels go, Gulf War II: Unfinished Business was a popular and omnipotent movie spectacle. The very process of naming the conflict implied a notion of watching a second episode and encountering the war from afar, whilst numerous media commentators likened their experience of the war to that of watching a movie, or even a movie of a movie. In turn political leaders from the ‘coalition of the willing’ were regularly able to call upon a stock of filmic cultural reference points in their representations of unfolding events in the Gulf. With Hollywood in a long-established role as geopolitician and film as a key geopolitical site, the latest conditions of conflict in the theatre of international politics could be (re)staged for the viewing American public. These events raise some important issues about the production of subject positions through cinema and highlight some of the ways in which film is cast in the role of director on the world geopolitical stage, writing the scripts of global politics as theatre. In the staging of the Second Gulf War and its multiple plots and dramas we argue here that there was an important intertext with the Second World War and its various associations with virtue. We focus in particular upon the figure of the geopolitician co-ordinating the production of the stage of international politics for a viewing subject and extend this into an analysis of how Hollywood narrates contemporary geopolitical space. Allied to this is a concern to explore how audiences make sense and meaning of the films they watch and the conflicts represented therein.

Anti-racism, deconstruction and ‘overdevelopment’

This paper explores the connections between colonialism and development in order to understand more clearly how discourses on North-South relations continue to be imbued with the imperial representations that preceded them. Beginning with a concern to examine how anti-racism can inform our understanding of the spaces of international development, the paper interrogates the colonial heritage of development studies and related disciplines and speculates on the possibility and necessity of disciplinary decolonization. Using the specific example of Portuguese imperial discourses of development in the 1950s and the 1960s, and the emergence of the heavily racialized ‘science’ of Lusotropicalism, the paper then examines the importance of deconstruction as a way of understanding the différance between colonialism and development in the Lusophone empire. The paper goes on to examine the particular example of postcolonial Mozambique, exploring the ways in which, between 1975 and 1988, Mozambicans struggled to acknowledge and deal with racism in postcolonial society, particularly in the context of Mozambique’s growing relationship with the World Bank in the mid-1980s. The paper concludes by suggesting that a more direct focus on ‘overdevelopment’ rather than just ‘underdevelopment’ may be one important (if neglected) way forward in ending the silences around ‘race’ and racism in development studies.

Africa and the export of China’s clean energy revolution

Abstract The spectacular scale and speed of China’s domestic renewable energy capacity development and technology catch-up has in recent years been followed by the ‘go out’ of Chinese clean energy technology firms seeking new markets and opportunities in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper explores the growing involvement of China in the development and transfer of renewable energy technologies in Africa and examines the key drivers and obstacles shaping Chinese renewable energy investments and exports. Far from there being some kind of grand or harmonious strategy directed by a single monolithic state, we argue that fragmented and decentralised state apparatuses and quasi-market actors in China are increasingly pursuing their own independent interests and agendas around renewable energy in Africa in ways often marked by conflict, inconsistency and incoherence. Moving beyond the state-centric analysis common in much of the research on contemporary China–Africa relations, we examine the motivations of a range of non-state and quasi-state actors, as well their different perceptions and constructions of risk, policy environments and political stability in recipient countries. The paper explores the case study example of South Africa, where Chinese firms have become increasingly significant in the diffusion of renewable energy technology.

Geopolitics and 'development' : an introduction.

Writing in 1987 and a few years after the establishment of the journal Political Geography, Peter Perry noted that “Anglo-American political geography poses and pursues a limited and impoverished version of the discipline, largely ignoring the political concerns of four fifths of humankind”. Eleanore Kofman reiterated this in the mid-1990s, noting “the heavily Anglocentric, let alone Eurocentric, bias of political geography writing”. These limitations are not unique to Political Geography however; ‘AngloAmerican’ human geography more widely has periodically been subject to a very similar critique. The concern articulated in some of these interventions is that there are dominant “parochial forms of theorising” in the discipline as a whole centred upon particular intellectual traditions and contexts leading to “a geography whose intellectual vision is limited to the concerns and perspectives of the richest countries in the world”. This “view from the West” has clearly shaped a wide range of theorisations in political geography such that “parochial knowledge” has continued to be “created in universal form”. This parochiality has been seen as based upon “a US-UK configuration” or “Euro-American axis” that has come to prominence in a way that potentially narrows the base of political geographical thought and obscures “the situated basis of its claims and vantage-point”.

Good Friends & Good Partners: The ‘New‘ Face of China-African Co-operation

The impetus for this special issue is the inescapable fact of China’s growing presence across Africa, as part of China’s wider internationalisation strategy. While the growth of Chinese influence was greeted by an explosion of media interest, involving some rather reactionary and ‘knee-jerk’ journalism declaring that China was behaving unacceptably and cynically, the past few years have seen realities on the ground as well as analysis changing. So, the first reason for this special issue was to collect papers that would reflect this new scholarship. Our second reason was that much of the early commentary was from the US and of the political right and saw China as a direct threat to US interests, which these authors insisted were less self-serving and more respectful of ‘decent’ values. Key arguments here are that China is cynically using development aid to ‘buy’ favours from despotic leaders; termed ‘rogue aid’ by Moisés Naím, the editor in chief of the US journal Foreign Policy. Moreover, China’s blasé attitude to good governance and respect for human rights is treated by the right wing analysts as an extension of China’s ‘natural’ way of conducting politics in contrast to the enlightened approach taken by US and its allied donors. These neo-conservative analyses also point out the ways China wilfully flouts labour and environmental laws and then the analysts find the relatively few examples of where Africans have angrily contested China’s presence on the continent to prove the venal nature of China in Africa. While this journal and work commissioned for this issue are not here to be apologists for China, we also wanted to collect papers which contrasted to this neo-conservative analysis through a broadly critical approach to political economy.