African Engagements

Ton Dietz is Director of the African Studies Centre and Professor of African Development at Leiden University and Professor of Human Geography at the University of Amsterdam. He recently published Silverlining Africa, his inaugural lecture at Leiden University (2011).Kjell Havnevik is Senior Researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, and Professor at the University of Agder, Norway. His most recent book is Biofuels, Land Grabbing and Food Security in Africa, edited with Prosper Matondi and Atakilte Beyene (Zed Books 2011).Mayke Kaag is Researcher at the African Studies Centre in Leiden and Assistant Professor of International Development Studies at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on African transnational relations, including engagements with the diaspora and transnational Islamic NGOs.Terje Oestigaard is Researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, Sweden. His particular research interests are water studies in the past and present and the archaeology of religion.

• CONTENTSFigures, Tables and Maps …….……….…………………………… viii1. African engagements: On whose terms? Africa negotiating an emerging multipolar world ……….. 1Ton Dietz, Kjell Havnevik, Mayke Kaag & Terje OestigaardPART I NEW TRENDS AND TENDENCIES IN AFRICA2. Trends in transnational political engagement in Africa: The promises of NEPAD … 35Samuel Teshale Derbe3. Political topographies of private security in Sub-Saharan Africa … 56Peer Schouten4. The neoliberalisation of nature in Africa …….…….……….. 84Bram Büscher5. Foreign land acquisitions in Madagascar: Competing jurisdictions of access claims .... 110Sandra Evers, Perrine Burnod, Andrianirina Ratsialonana Rivo & André Teyssier6. Mobilising Brazil as ‘significant other’ in the fight for HIV/Aids treatment in South Africa: The TreatmentAction Campaign (TAC) and its global allies .………….… 133Wiebe Nauta7. Beyond negotiating a multipolar world: Sudan’s non-Western development cooperation alternative .. 163Mohamed SalihPART IIFRAMING MULTIPOLARITY8. How does the Chinese involvement in the African continent affect African sovereignty in the contextof the changing nature of power? ………….………….……… 185Sanne van der Lugt9. China into Africa: Conflict or the triumph of Western order? ..……..…………. 204Gorm Rye Olsen10. Railway time: Technology transfer and the role of Chinese experts in the history of TAZARA .….… 226Liu Haifang & Jamie Monson11. China-Africa relations: The relevance of strategic engagement of African civil society organisations with China..... 252Antony Otieno Ong’ayo12. New topographies of power? Africa negotiating an emerging multipolar world …….. 280Simona Vittorini & David Harris13. The Obama administration’s engagements in Africa within historical context: Great expectations versusdaunting challenges ..……….. 300Peter J. SchraederPART IIINEW SPACE FOR AFRICAN ENGAGEMENTS?14. Public policy formation in Africa in the wake of the global financial meltdown: Building blocks for a New Mind in a multipolar world …..……….……..….. 327Lloyd G.A. Amoah15. Aligning and harnessing the gains of globalisation to an African advantage: Towards ‘glo-fricanisation’ .… 346Lawrence Ogbo Ugwuanyi16. Africa in the world: A historical view ..….…………….……. 364Stephen EllisList of contributors ……………….……….………………………….. 377Index ………………………………….……….………………………….. 385

"The concerns in question, which synergize quite smoothly, focus on emergent socio-economic and political trends in Africa, the impact of rising global powers on these trends, and the role of African agency in all of this. The pointed focus on African agency within the ambit of a multipolar world carves a special attention niche for this work. As the editors aver in their introduction, ‘by taking multipolarity as the central focus and by highlighting the agency of Africa in co-shaping the new global world order, while also adopting a historically sensitive approach, this book serves to document and analyse new developments’ (p. 6). They may claim a success that other works on this subject (a virtual industry given the topicality of the issues) have generally failed to pull off. The literature in recent times on Africa/China-India-Brazil relations has tended to cast Africa, in a very unsophisticated manner, as a puerile, languid, and bat-blind geopolitical and economic entity, both unwilling and incapable of protecting and pursuing her interests. This book contests such a view trenchantly and underscores the varying ways in which Africa’s peoples in business, civil society, and government are navigating the new architecture of global power relations on and outside the African continent ... A must-read, certainly." - Lloyd Amoah, Ashesi University, in: African Affairs, July 2012