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/328/ The New Scramble for Africa (Patreon)

Published:
2023-03-21 17:09:00
Edited:
2023-03-21 17:18:29
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

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  • 328-africascramble.mp3

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Content

On geopolitical competition over Africa.

[Patreon Exclusive]

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

Files

Comments

Virgilio Urbina Lazardi

George, know that the brief invective against EEAAO is welcome. Fuck that movie, and its reception is a searing indictment of contemporary liberal culture

Richard R

I wonder if the actual spoils of war are necessary for imperialism to benefit the ruling class. The US titanically failed in Afghanistan, and it didn't translate into gains for the general population. Not at all surprising in retrospect, of course, but in 2003, people in the US were salivating at the oil fields, quite explicitly, with cultural artifacts like the Hummer. But instead the ruling class mainly benefited by extracting profits from the war machine itself rather than any material, strategic gains. Gains were made not only for weapons manufacturers, but also through the information economy's pipeline to national security agencies, and the Atlantic literati who made careers on PR for the war on terror. Maybe the failure of the war on terror coinciding with the ideological disintegration of the 2010s shows that imperialism is still pretty much just displacement. But I wonder if losing the war is almost more profitable: there's less to manage after all, and we all hate the worst class (tm) at least partly because we're already managing too much.

J98

Jeez Louise, Mr. ACKHTUALLY it's pronounce Ah-Tah-vist NOT AY-Tah-vist quickly becomes Mr. TrAlling when saying trolling.

Richard R

This may be a stupid question but I think it's worth explaining what is meant when people say that very few, if any, African polities before colonization were "sovereign states." Are we talking about an ideological difference? A technological one? A combination, like a technology of the state? It seems to me that a seldom-mentioned aspect of sovereignty is just being hard to conquer. So when we say that the situation in the post-colonial context is different, we are saying that it's no longer direct expropriation by a foreign-run colonial government because it isn't worth it for France or Britain to occupy the territory any more. Now it seems we're talking about yet a third imperial/colonial situation, where African nations aren't just not worth conquering, they're in fact more valuable to imperialists as nominally independent, self-determining states that are operated by a local bourgeoisie, exploiting a local population. Sovereignty itself seems a troublesome term in this context, as development of a self-governing social structure is needed in order to implement the kinds of labor and resource exploitation that is sought by foreign imperialists.

Elias B

If displacement in the classical Hobsonian sense plays a role in the new scramble it's surely on the Chinese side. They're the ones (with Germany, but they displace it mainly on the rest of the EZ) who in today's world have a huge capital surplus because their population isn't rich enough to consume what they produce. This is also the reason they're the only ones who can make a decent economic offer to Africa while France, Russia or the US have to make do with military or political means.

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.

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.