The history of relations between Africa and the world appears to have accelerated at the beginning of the 2020s. Three recent developments particularly illustrate what resembles a “geopolitical de-westernisation” of the continent. The first and most spectacular is France’s security and diplomatic eviction from the Sahel through a domino effect, under pressure from military juntas in Mali (2022), Burkina Faso (2023) and Niger (2024), where new nationalist leaders broke with Paris to ally with Russia, following the surprising request of a president who came to power through a constitutional coup in Chad (2025), and under the impetus of a sovereigntist president democratically elected in Senegal (2025).

Another episode in the decline of Western influence in Africa played out in New York in March 2022, when seventeen African nations refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at the United Nations, thwarting the Euro-American strategy of forming a united international front to isolate Vladimir Putin. Africa’s disconnection from the Western pole was confirmed the following year in Johannesburg, during the annual BRICS [1] Summit. The membership of Egypt and Ethiopia, as well as the interest expressed by several African governments in joining this alliance, testify to the growing attractiveness of this “alternative” geopolitical bloc and the multipolar order it promotes.

These important geopolitical facts attest to the process of redistribution of influence underway on the continent in the context of mutations in the international system. This issue of Alternatives Sud is devoted to the driving forces behind these reconfigurations. Africa is indeed a major theatre of the increasingly open strategic rivalry that opposes Europe to Russia, the United States to China. Undoubtedly, the continent is caught up in the new forms of alignment caused by “the recomposition of binary representations of the world, politically worked by actors aspiring to play a leadership role among the ’Souths’ or to attract the support of what Russian authorities now call the ’global majority’ against ’the West’” (Allès, 2024). Trump’s rise to power certainly radically changes Washington’s African policy, but does not challenge the bipartisan strategic priority of containing Chinese influence, in this part of the world as elsewhere.

Nevertheless, and unlike the Cold War, the geopolitical competition facing the continent cannot be reduced to the agendas of the great powers: middle powers, particularly Middle Eastern ones, are developing multiform influence there, playing their own diplomatic tune according to their national interests. The proliferation since the 2010s of “Africa + 1” summits (EU-Africa, China-Africa, Russia-Africa, Turkey-Africa, UAE-Africa, etc.) is an indicator of the diplomatic one-upmanship for African countries’ attention and favour.

The expression “new scramble for Africa” is regularly used to describe the vigour of these appetites. [2] The image is evocative, but as Abrahamsen, Chimhandamba and Chipato note in their contribution to this Alternatives Sud, it only partially accounts for what is at stake in relations between Africa and the rest of the world, by suggesting that the continent is the passive object of external schemes.

Yet African states maintain an active relationship with their international environment, despite their weaknesses and dependencies. They must be considered as protagonists of the ongoing geopolitical recompositions, with the diversification of partnerships with external actors providing them with new resources and room for manœuvre. This African capacity for action is expressed collectively, mainly through the African Union, which endeavours as best it can to formulate and voice African demands in multilateral forums.

From the Donor Oligopoly to the Return of Geopolitical Competition

The renewed interest in Africa we are witnessing follows a period of international marginalisation of the continent, between the end of the Cold War and the 2000s. This phase was marked by economic crises, conflicts, state failure and the geopolitical devaluation of a region that no longer had the same strategic importance in the new unipolar world order. Latent rivalry did oppose the United States, which had sounded the end of postcolonial hunting grounds, and France, but overall, the continent was the object of (military-)humanitarian interventions rather than diplomatic or economic investments.

A symptom of this relative disinterest was the decline in official development aid amounts during the 1990s. The continent’s interstate relations with the rest of the world were then practically reduced to the asymmetrical relationships it maintained with its creditors - Western countries and financial institutions (IMF [3] and World Bank) dominated by them. This oligopoly of funders shared the same liberal vision of Africa’s problems, and subordinated their aid and debt relief to the implementation of economic and governance reforms.

China was the first emerging country to interpose itself in this Africa-West face-off. A “return,” in the mid-1990s, first dictated by its economic priorities: importing natural resources (to feed its booming industrial apparatus) and exporting its low-end production to new markets. Beijing established a cooperation model tailored to its needs - financial loans and infrastructure construction in exchange for long-term access to African deposits - under the watchful eye of Western countries.

Since then, the growth in Sino-African trade has been vertiginous: +2,100% between 2002 and 2022. By 2013, China became the continent’s leading trade partner (Moses et al., 2024). It is also now its leading bilateral creditor, although its loans have sharply decreased after the 2016 peak. The rise in commodity prices linked to Chinese demand was the main factor behind Africa’s economic growth surge in the early 2000s and the wave of Afro-optimism that soon gripped global investors.

Chinese expansion in Africa immediately engaged geopolitical considerations, but this dimension gained centrality after Xi Jinping’s rise to power in 2013 and the adoption of a more assertive foreign policy. The effects of the 2008-2011 financial crisis and persistent Western disinvestment on the continent were then perceived as “strategic opportunities,” in the eyes of the Communist Party, to politically attach Africa to China. Alongside financing and diplomatic tours, this cooptation effort was served by the continent’s inclusion in the global infrastructure network of the new Silk Roads [4].

Géraud Neema notes in this book that “chequebook diplomacy” has translated into African countries’ support in multilateral forums on essential issues for Beijing, particularly the principle of “One China” [5]. The Chinese economic slowdown and African countries’ debt levels have certainly led to a sharp drop in this financial commitment since the late 2010s but, as the same author notes, the 2024 China-Africa Summit shows that expectations of Africa’s adherence to the Chinese strategy of revising the world order have not diminished, quite the contrary.

The drivers of Russia’s re-engagement in Africa are more directly geopolitical and fit into the counter-hegemonic strategy outlined by Vladimir Putin in his 2007 Munich speech against the world’s “unipolarity.” A continent neglected by the new international order, Africa can potentially serve as a lever for the advent of the multipolar world desired by the Russian president. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ensuing tensions with Europe and the United States accelerated Moscow’s deployment of its African policy, whose main vector is the provision of security resources.

The Kremlin indeed strives to capitalise politically on its role as the continent’s leading arms supplier, by multiplying military cooperation agreements and strengthening its ties with its main clients (Algeria, Egypt, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Angola, etc.) (Vigne, 2018). It also offers a series of security services to embattled African regimes by promoting its “Syrian calling card” (Delanoë, 2023). This activity is unofficially subcontracted to semi-private paramilitary militias (starting with Wagner, which became Africa Corps in 2023), first in Central African Republic, then in Sudan, Libya, Mozambique, Mali, Burkina Faso, more recently in Niger and Equatorial Guinea.

The shift of three Sahelian countries (Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger) into its orbit constitutes Russia’s main diplomatic breakthrough on the continent, at the expense of French influence. As Folashadé Soulé indicates in her contribution, Russia profited from the bogging down of the anti-jihadist campaign, disagreements between Sahelian and French soldiers on the right strategy to adopt against insurgents, and popular rejection of the French military presence... which the Russians themselves had stoked. Joint naval exercises with South Africa one year after Ukraine’s invasion, numerous visits by African dignitaries to Moscow, or African countries’ abstentions during UN votes condemning Ukraine’s invasion are other manifestations of Russia’s growing geopolitical footprint in Africa.

Nevertheless, this should not be exaggerated. The low density of Russian-African economic relations [6] and African states’ fear of losing access to Western financing constitute brakes on Russian diplomatic expansion on the continent, especially as Moscow has priorities in other theatres. Moreover, the Russian army’s inability to prevent Bashar al-Assad’s fall in December 2024 (then Iran’s bombing six months later) has tarnished the image of a reliable security alternative cultivated by Moscow and weakened its position in Sahelian capitals (Le Monde, 20 December 2024).

Russians and Chinese are not the only ones stealing market shares from Western countries in Africa - middle powers are developing active and notable diplomacy there. India, for example, sees in its African engagement an adjuvant in its unfinished quest for great power status, in addition to an investment to counterbalance Chinese rival influence on the continent (and its votes). New Delhi can rely on a dynamic commercial relationship (+18% per year since 2003) that places it as the continent’s 3^rd trade partner after the EU and China, as well as on the importance of its diaspora, the insertion of Indian companies into the African economic fabric, the dynamism of its technical cooperation, particularly in disseminating accessible technologies (mobile payments, renewable energy, vaccines).

Diplomatically, the Indians claim to have obtained the inclusion of the African Union as a full member of the G-20, thanks to the New Delhi Summit in 2023. With the expected quid pro quo that African countries support India’s candidacy for the UN Security Council, an objective officially formulated by Narendra Modi during a speech before the Ugandan parliament five years earlier (Nantulya, 2024).

But the most underestimated development in African geopolitics in these times of new Cold War lies in the growing and multiform presence of Middle Eastern nations - Turkey, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran - on the continent. If the drivers of their investment are economic, political, security and cultural all at once, the objective of asserting their role as rising regional powers seems to predominate.

Mesut Özcan and Mehmet Köse return in this Alternatives Sud to the trajectory and motivations of Turkish expansion in Africa. The opening of dozens of new embassies and the unequalled number, for a non-African head of state, of tours on the continent by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, primarily translate the quest for status as an indispensable power on the world stage. This relatively recent dynamism, however, fits into the continuity of principles that have guided Turkish diplomacy since African independence, namely the desire for autonomy vis-à-vis Western “allies” and the search for economic outlets for national industry.

Remaining in the economic domain, the financial role of Saudi Arabia and the UAE in Africa now rivals that of the great powers. The UAE, in particular, recently announced nearly one hundred billion dollars of investment in renewable energy, ports, mines, agriculture, infrastructure and construction (Pilling et al., 2024). These commitments are part of a strategy of economic diversification and food security reinforcement, but they are also a vector of geopolitical and security influence. The tens of billions of dollars destined for Egypt aim to economically stabilise a regime, that of Al-Sisi, considered a bulwark against the expansion of the political force most feared by Abu Dhabi, the political Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood. [7]

The UAE also strives to strengthen its African positions by supporting, more or less clandestinely, parties involved in internal conflicts in Libya, Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, at the risk of aggravating or perpetuating violence. Husam Mahjoub focuses particularly in these pages on how Abu Dhabi interfered in the civil war that has torn Sudan apart since 2023, by supporting the Rapid Support Forces [8], a paramilitary militia suspected of war crimes and ethnic cleansing on such a scale that the United Nations warns of a “very high” risk of genocide (Le Monde, 23 June 2025).

More generally, North Africa and the Horn of Africa appear as the theatre of proxy confrontations waged by nearby and Middle Eastern powers engaged in the race for regional domination - Turkey and Qatar compete with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Iran with Saudi Arabia, Turkey with Iran, Saudi Arabia with the UAE, etc.

If, at the beginning of 2025, France is still busy drawing lessons from its Sahelian rout, Western powers are not remaining passive in the face of the assertion of these new competitors south of the Mediterranean. Witness the 2022 launch of the Global Gateway initiative, a European large-scale investment programme in developing countries’ infrastructure with the avowed objective of responding to the new Silk Roads, including on the African continent. The challenge is both to (re-)connect Africa and its resources to value chains controlled by Europe and to reconquer lost ground geopolitically against China and Russia, by increasing financial commitments but also by better communicating about investments and aid from the Union and its member states (Teevan et al., 2022).

The United States has even more explicitly made containing Chinese influence an official axis of an African policy... that the Trump administration is busy dismantling as part of a “total structural reorganisation” of the State Department with a view to alignment with the “America First” doctrine (La Croix, 20 April 2025). This reduction of US diplomatic surface area is supposed to be compensated by concluding bilateral agreements on a case-by-case basis, aimed at guaranteeing American companies’ access to critical minerals. A strategy tested in Central Africa, where the United States strives to reconcile the DRC and Rwanda after promising to invest six billion dollars (£4.7 billion) in transport infrastructure connecting the Congolese copper region to the port of Lobito in Angola. The “battle of corridors” in Africa is just beginning (Vircoulon, 2024).

Deployment of Post-Western Soft Power

A common trait among all Western competitors is legitimising their expansion on the continent by highlighting the absence of colonial compromising in Africa, a historical virginity that would guarantee a relationship of another nature, a “more respectful,” “equitable,” “fraternal,” “win-win” South-South cooperation than that which African states maintain with former metropoles, with their irremediably “neocolonial” aims.

This rhetoric is accompanied by the mobilisation of narrative references around the common condition of former colonised nations and historical solidarities, quite real but magnified, in struggles for independence and against apartheid [9]. Russians and Chinese abundantly use this repertoire, as is well known, but this is also the case for Turks, whose president repeats ad nauseam during his African trips that “Turkey, heir to the Sublime Porte [10], never colonised” (Özcan and Köse in this Alternatives Sud), whilst Indians do not hesitate to recall Gandhi or Nehru’s activism for the “continent’s liberation” (Nantulya, 2024).

These discursive strategies are all the more effective as they deploy in a context that can be qualified as “Western fatigue” on the African continent. Defiance is specifically strong in Francophone Africa, traversed by a wave of sovereigntist aspiration in the face of the perception of French economic, monetary, military and political tutelage, and more particularly in the Sahel, where the presence of the French army in the context of an endless security crisis has increasingly been experienced as an occupation.

Folashadé Soulé shows this well in her article: demonstrations against French military presence and for Russian intervention, which prepared the ground for coups d’état, were “strongly influenced by what some designate as the work of a ’Russosphere’ in Africa,” namely a multiform anti-French informational influence apparatus orchestrated by Russia and its relays on African social networks (Audinet and Limonier, 2022).

Nevertheless, and beyond the former French preserve, the decline in Western countries’ legitimacy on which competitors’ strategies prosper is inseparable from the deepening of political conditionalities, increasingly experienced as a dispossession of sovereignty and the manifestation of “moral imperialism” (Olivier de Sardan, 2022). It also results from the general impression of “former colonisers’” hypocrisy regarding humanist principles, in the context of migration policies, the covid vaccine race or Africa’s “forgotten” wars.

In China’s and Russia’s case especially, the denigration of the “collective West” goes hand in hand with the promotion of alternative political systems to that of liberal democracy, which have considerable potential for seduction among African elites.

The expression “Beijing Consensus” (as opposed to the “Washington Consensus” [11]) emerged in the mid-2000s to qualify “Chinese-style” development strategies, emphasising non-interference (absence of conditionality) and priority to productive apparatus development over democratisation issues.

This strategy of diffusing global norms was affirmed in the early 2020s within the framework of three Chinese global initiatives (development, security and civilisation) aimed at supplanting the Western model with universalist vocation (Kewalramani, 2024). The objective of aligning African leaders with this Sino-centred global governance project was at the heart of the 2024 China-Africa summit for “jointly building a China-Africa community of shared future for all seasons in a new era” (see Neema’s article).

The development of ideological influence in Africa also passes through civilisational, identity and religious registers. It is with undeniable success that Russia has erected itself as the worldwide defender of traditional and family values against what many Africans consider a Western cultural offensive of exporting norms (feminism, LGBTQI rights) contrary to “African values” (Banégas et al., 2024). The objective is to dig a cultural and political chasm between African countries (and the “Global South” generally) on one side and the United States and Europe on the other (Mandaville, 2022).

On the side of emerging Muslim powers, references to Islam occupy a place of honour in Middle and Near Eastern countries’ efforts to seduce African countries. Saudi Arabia has an unequalled comparative advantage in this domain, which it draws from the growing influence of its network of religious institutions on the type of Islam practised on African soil. [12]

The development of soft power in the African context also depends more classically on opening diplomatic representations - the number of embassies has gone in a few years from a handful to several dozen for Turkey, Qatar, UAE or India, whilst the United States prepares to close most of theirs on the continent - financing development and humanitarian projects (versus the dismantling of US cooperation) and deploying multiform cultural and educational cooperation.

This is what Mesut Özcan and Mehmet Köse discuss in their article, evoking the dissemination of Maarif schools, intended to promote Turkish language and culture, and the distribution of thousands of scholarships to African students, which have contributed to making Turkey a privileged destination, whilst possibilities of access to studies in Europe are restricted under the effect of migration and austerity policies.

The African media sphere is logically not spared by these influence struggles, whose vigour on social networks has already been mentioned. China and Russia in particular work to reduce the audience of Western channels (BBC, TV5 Monde, RFI...) in favour of their own channels (Russia Today, Sputnik, CGTN) or “Pan-African” media they influence. As Géraud Neema notes, “Beijing mobilises several levers: training African journalists, providing content to local media and expanding its own organs, such as the Xinhua agency and China Global Television Network (CGTN)” (Neema, 2025).

North African audiences have long been the object of competition between the very geopolitically marked Al Jazeera (controlled by Qatar) and Al Arabiya (controlled by Saudi Arabia). One can also note the 2019 launch by Iran of Hausa TV, addressed to West Africa’s 50 million Hausa speakers (Bouvier, 2024), and that in 2023 of TRT Africa channel by the Turkish public broadcaster, accessible in French, English, Hausa and Swahili, with the stated goal of “proposing a different narrative from that of Western channels on the continent” (www.agenceecofin.com, 3 April 2023).

African Room for Manoeuvre and Capacity for Action

Several authors of this issue of Alternatives Sud denounce the biases of the international relations discipline in its approach to relations between postcolonial Africa and the rest of the world. African countries have too long been presented as the “objects,” “targets” or “terrains” of alliance strategies driven by powers external to the continent. Against this Western-centred approach, Rita Abrahamsen, Barbra Chimhandamba and Farai Chipato emphasise “the importance of African agency, understood in the broad sense of power and influence that several actors on the continent have implemented on the international stage.” It is in this concern to restore local actors’ “agency” that Folashadé Soulé returns in these pages to the viewpoints of Sahelian political and military leaders on the issues and risks of the strategy of partnership diversification in security matters.

This approach through the power of action is all the more necessary as the appearance of a new offer of support from emerging actors engenders a competitive situation that reinforces African states’ room for manœuvre to (re-)negotiate the terms of their relations with the rest of the world. This new context places African leaders back in the configuration that prevailed during the Cold War, in which they could trade their maintenance in the camp of the “free world” or the socialist bloc.

This competition strategy underlies Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi’s declaration, disappointed by the lack of Western support in the conflict with Rwanda, according to which “[Russia] and China in Africa behave better than Westerners. They don’t claim to lecture us” (LCI, 4 May 2024). It also motivates the same Tshisekedi’s pressure on Beijing to renegotiate mining contracts, signed under his predecessor, with a view to a more balanced sharing of copper and cobalt revenues between Chinese companies and the Congolese state. Or his passage, within a few months, to Doha and Abu Dhabi, to play Gulf monarchies’ rivalries in terms of investments (Battory and Vircoulon, 2024).

It is with this objective of regaining geopolitical weight in Western countries’ eyes that many African countries consider rapprochement with BRICS or signing military agreements with Russia, China or Turkey. African states are therefore proactive actors in transforming their international environment towards greater competition, rather than toys of competition between ascending or declining imperial powers. For a majority of these states, and like most Global South states basically, the ongoing geopolitical repositioning consists of “multi-alignment” and pragmatic exploitation of the diversification of economic and military support suppliers rather than alliance reversal and realignment with one camp or another.

But African capacity for action is also a capacity for collective action on the international stage. It is expressed mainly through the African Union, which Abrahamsen, Chimhandamba and Chipato analyse in light of its creators’ ambition to make it the instrument for concretising the Pan-African project. It should be recalled that this emancipatory political ideology born in the American-Caribbean space is at the foundation of the creation of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in 1964, which its principal architect, Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah, envisaged as the premises of the United States of Africa.

The founding of the African Union on the ashes of the OAU in 2002 aimed to revitalise this African political union project, in the wake of apartheid’s end, so that Africa could “take its rightful place in international affairs,” to paraphrase South African President Thabo Mbeki. The new organisation associated the ambitions of continental integration and global assertion with promoting democracy and human rights ideals, the three objectives meant to mutually reinforce each other.

The same authors draw a mixed assessment of the African Union’s first twenty years of existence. They present as indisputable advances the adoption of “common African positions” at the United Nations, particularly regarding Security Council reform (Ezulwini Consensus [13]), the creation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA [14]), the adoption of the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance, the strengthening of the African peace and security architecture according to the principle of “African solutions to African problems” or the coordination of national responses to the covid pandemic. One can also credit the regional organisation with the slow emergence of coordinated environmental diplomacy on climate matters, whose contours and constraints Moïse Tsayem endeavours to describe in his contribution.

Nevertheless, Rita Abrahamsen and her colleagues cast a lucid eye on the regional organisation’s limits. They note concerning regressions in those same domains where progress has been made. Regarding promoting democracy and human rights, the organisation “seems to have abdicated its intransigence towards coups d’état and anticonstitutional changes of power” that have multiplied on the continent. On the peace and security front, the Union’s ambition to “silence the guns” has never seemed so ambitious, given the number and murderous violence of conflicts. A cruel illustration of this impotence: if the DRC and Rwanda have just signed a preliminary peace agreement as we finalise this Alternatives Sud, it is in a non-African framework, under the aegis of American and Qatari administrations, after three years of sterile negotiations at the regional level.

Finally, the context of an international system moving towards multipolarisation constitutes a serious challenge to asserting an African agenda in response to major global issues, despite growing international recognition of the continent’s geopolitical importance. This difficulty in speaking with one voice manifests in the minor role played by the African Union in “Africa + 1” summits, where bilateral negotiations with each African head of state predominate (Tevoedjre, 2023). It clearly appeared in the framework of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, faced with which the continent failed to be the stability pole it aimed to be, the Union’s actions proving “at best ambiguous, revealing an almost impossible balancing exercise consisting of simultaneously satisfying African supporters of Moscow, countries opposed to the war and countries attached to neutrality” (Abrahamsen et al.).

It also manifested during the Israeli offensive on Gaza, according to Patrick Bond, whose interview we reproduce in this issue, where “we saw how African countries were divided and manipulated on the question of supporting Israel, some having been literally bought by Tel Aviv.” Moreover, a large part of the regional organisation’s difficulties lies in the “implementation crisis” of its resolutions, which often remain a dead letter due to member states’ lack of political will, rivalries between them and the institution’s dependence on foreign financing. [15]

From Neocolonialism to Sub-imperialism?

If the geopolitical recompositions that interest us have manifestly not contributed to the continent’s democratisation and pacification, have the geoeconomic reconfigurations that accompany them modified African countries’ development trajectory, in the sense of a more advantageous insertion into globalisation? Presenting themselves as more pragmatic and respectful of sovereignties, the new “South-South” cooperations indeed carry promises of economic transformation and industrialisation, at a time when many African heads of state place the objective of transforming natural resources high in their development strategies.

Several emerging countries therefore claim to contribute to extracting African countries from the role of raw material suppliers in which Western countries’ “neocolonialism” has confined them since independence. The concept of “modernisation,” mentioned thirteen times by Xi Jinping in his speech to African heads of state gathered during the 2024 China-Africa summit, thus refers to the “right to industrialise” according to one’s own cultural, historical and social context, outside Western standards, as China has done (see Neema’s contribution).

In other words, if it has undoubtedly contributed to African growth rates over the past twenty years, has the densification of economic relations with emerging countries nevertheless been the vector of African economies’ diversification, technology and know-how transfers, creation of high value-added and/or labour-intensive activities, more resistant to international shocks? The mass of loans and investments from emerging countries has concentrated in infrastructure, natural resources and energy sectors, to a lesser extent construction and telecommunications. Infrastructure and energy shortages are indeed obstacles to industrialisation processes. But have these positive effects, as well as Chinese investments in African manufacturing industry, real though limited outside Ethiopia’s specific case, counterbalanced the countless bankruptcies caused by competition from low-price Chinese products?

Patrick Bond’s answer is clear-cut. “[T]he BRICS have not changed the international division of labour nor sought to reform multilateral institutions like the IMF, World Bank or WTO. I would even go so far as to say that the BRICS have amplified these problems. [...] Infrastructure projects financed by China in Africa are not designed for the continent’s development, but to accelerate resource extraction for Chinese companies’ benefit. [...] in Africa, raw materials are exported to China and manufactured products imported, as the old neocolonial logic demands [...] Similarly, Russian mercenaries or Indian conglomerates like Vedanta exploit the continent as Western companies did (and still do).”

The BRICS therefore develop, according to Patrick Bond, a “sub-imperialist” strategy in their respective spheres of influence. The same concept of sub-imperialism is used by Husam Mahjoub in his contribution to describe UAE action in Africa. The UAE’s investments in African ports, lands and mines aim to strengthen their companies’ and sovereign funds’ positions in value chains that structure the continent’s capitalist exploitation, without favouring the diversification of concerned countries’ economies.

Emirati expansion also shows how non-Western investors’ role is problematic regarding agricultural development and support for small peasantry. Asian countries, starting with Gulf countries, are indeed overrepresented in recent years’ large-scale land transactions for securing their food and energy supplies, forest exploitation, carbon compensation..., at the price of host countries’ food sovereignty and increased intercommunity tensions. [16]

At the risk of darkening the picture, one must also mention the effects of many African countries’ over-indebtedness vis-à-vis China, for works whose utility for development is often questionable, whose repayment weighs (as much as Western loans) on national budgets to the detriment of health and education, and which Beijing instrumentalises politically to strengthen its grip on critical mineral resources (Mhango, 2024).

And yet, international recompositions generate opportunities for developing an African industrial base. Competition between foreign powers for access to strategic minerals provides negotiating levers to African leaders, more in a position to demand that the exploiter invest in local transformation of raw materials, skills transfer, construction of multipurpose infrastructure, development of national supply chains. The US-DRC-Zambia cooperation memorandum on establishing a value chain in the electric battery sector is the most ambitious example of this new type of “geopolitically motivated” engagement.

On the other hand, the decline in Chinese demand for raw materials (caused by American protectionism) and the disappearance of the US trade preferences programme in favour of Africa (AGOA [17]), should, according to Patrick Bond and several African economists, be considered by African governments as occasions to reorient their production apparatus towards the continent. A concerted African trade strategy, through accelerating AfCFTA implementation, could contribute to industrialisation and strengthening regional value chains.

Ultimately, African countries’ capacity to convert the opportunities carried by new international configurations into social development will depend on the existence of a political consensus not subjected to the (sole) short-term interests of local powerbrokers and foreign powers, Western or Global South. The emergence of an “elite pact accompanied by common commitment to inclusive development,” to use the formula of the former chief economist of British development cooperation (Dercon, 2024), nevertheless does not occur independently of sociopolitical relations internal to African societies. The manifestation of popular demand, whatever its form (electoral, union, religious, riot) will influence the determination of those in power to negotiate international alliances from a perspective of the general interest.

François Polet

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