Africa's Global Engagement: Perspectives from Emerging Countries

The book analyses how India’s rise to the status of an emerging power has affected New Delhi’s Africa policy, after sketching the historical evolution and normative underpinnings of Indo-African relations, and what challenges it has brought for New Delhi’s engagement with the continent.

India and Africa share a history dating back millennia. Today, India is one of Africa’s biggest trading partner countries, second only to China. The country regularly extends lines of credit worth billions to African nations, and its pharmaceutical producers dominate many African markets; almost one-fifth of India’s oil imports and more than one-quarter of its natural gas imports come from the continent. However, relations between India and Africa are far from being limited to economic cooperation.

The book scrutinises three foreign policy fields: (1) India’s foreign economic policy towards Africa with an in-depth analysis of Indo-African trade, investment and lines of credit; (2) New Delhi’s development cooperation policy vis-à-vis Africa, its principles, instruments and volume; (3) India’s politico-diplomatic foreign and security policy vis-à-vis Africa, including New Delhi's high-level diplomacy, security and diaspora policy as well as multilateral Africa policy.

This book provides a comprehensive study of Indonesia's contemporary foreign policy engagement with Africa, highlighting the archipelago’s recent reawakening to the continent. It explores thoughts on Afro-Asian relations in general and their future in the changing geopolitical context. It provides a vision of Indonesia’s foreign policy and political situation at the highest level of leadership. It places Indonesia in a multi-comparison context, which helps us reconsider Indonesia today and widens our views on Indonesia’s needs to be better known through new perspectives and voices able to better convey the realities of its polity, aspirations, and complexities. It proposes, through the study of Indonesia’s African endeavour, to better grasp the contemporary Indonesian Zeitgeist and Weltanschauung. It also analyses the political power alliance formed by President Jokowi and former General Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan, leading a state-led development through state capitalism, mobilising State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs). The Bandung Conference host aspires to project its domestic development achievements towards Africa, focusing on Africa for Africa and not merely as part of a sometimes-abstract Afro-Asian discourse. Nonetheless, Afro-Asianism continues to be mobilised to facilitate market penetration and serve domestic interests.

The book shows how Indonesia’s foreign policy toward Africa relates to domestic political contestation and consolidation, political legacy and commodity-based industrial policy, and Chinese and “China in Africa” networks and ideational influence, foremost among other networks of influence in the Jokowi era. The book also underlines how Indonesia’s knowledge production and academic deficiencies negatively impact its foreign policy capabilities, notably as a potential robust alternative partner for Africa. It will be beneficial for students, academicians, researchers, and diplomats. 

This book sheds light on the practice, challenges, and prospects of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) amidst wide contestation, backlash, operational challenges, and expectation gaps associated with the theory and practice of the RtoP. Diverging from existing works, it provides a renewed perspective and alternatives for future deployment of the RtoP and critical insights to the readers on how issues such as support, consolidation, and institutionalization within the broader context of regional dynamics of the RtoP can be best achieved in Africa. The book will be of particular interest to diplomats, international relations experts, scholars, RtoP advocates, the United Nations, and the African Union.

This book examines the nature of conflict in Africa vis-à-vis the African Union (AU) peace and security architecture in Africa. It focuses on the intense campaign ‘Silencing the Guns by 2020’ since 2013, one of the flagship projects of Agenda 2063 to achieve a conflict-free continent by AU. It analyses various causes of conflict in Africa using case studies to pursue the causality and dynamics of these conflicts, which often point to the intersectionality of historical legacies of colonialism and neo-colonialism. It further examines the interplay of factors such as resource curse, resource exploitation, election-induced violence, political violence, incessant and interminable challenges of social justice, oppression, contemporary governance, and leadership dynamics. It also focuses on the application and integration of conflict and gender for analytical reflection. In the quest for a “Peaceful and secure Africa”, this book examines the different mechanisms to prevent, manage, and resolve conflicts on the continent, and the challenges thereof. It probes and investigates by asking critical questions about continental conflict dynamics and peace architectures which warrants in-depth inquiry and interrogation.

This book provides an insight into the complex entanglements between African countries and India, China, and South Korea from multidisciplinary perspectives connecting approaches from cultural, anthropological, literary, and music studies and art history. The three parts present a regional focus, namely Africa-India, Africa-South Korea, and Africa-China while the single contributions speak to each other and offer complementary insights. At the same time, the chapters also link across the regional realms as they deal with similar topics, such as travelling music genres. In part I, for Pombo material culture is the starting point to investigate the connections between the islands of the Indian Ocean and India by questioning the construction of memory. It highlights various aspects of the multilayered history of connections between Africa, the islands, and India. Part II gathers contributions that are complimentary to each other and therefore contribute to the understanding of the complex entanglements in area studies. Part III (Africa-South Korea) explores the impact of African-American arts and artists on South Korea's popular culture as well as the changing perception of artists of African descent in visual popular culture. It shows the impact of Korean content in South Africa.