scholarly journals China and the United States in Africa

2020 ◽  
Vol 06 (01) ◽  
pp. 123-141
Author(s):  
Lei Wang

China and the United States are among the most important external stakeholders in Africa’s peace, security, and prosperity. The African continent, with some of the world’s fastest-growing economies, an expanding consumer base, and an exploding youth population, has recently witnessed intensifying China-U.S. competition. In economic and trade terms, the United States is playing catch-up as Beijing has long ago overtaken Washington as the continent’s largest trading partner and investor. While China regards Africa’s adherence to the “One China” principle as the only political prerequisite for its engagement with the continent, the United States views greater democracy and rule of law in Africa as in the best interests of both. China’s security presence in Africa pales in comparison with that of the United States, as Washington boasts an extensive network of military bases on the continent while Beijing’s peace and security engagement mainly involves multilateral UN peacekeeping operations and bilateral security cooperation, such as arms sales and training programs. However, growing China-U.S. competition does not necessarily crowd out shared interests or preclude closer coordination in specific areas, for example, market development, infrastructure building, anti-piracy, health capacity-building, and so on. By fending off a senseless ideological contest, respecting each other’s core interests in Africa, accommodating Africans’ development aspirations and security concerns, Beijing and Washington can find more common ground than many believe.

2005 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-402
Author(s):  
Akhilesh Chandra Prabhakar

Abstract The path from Africa to Indonesia – via West Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia – has been of vital interest to North America. Situated at a junction of three continents – namely Asia, Africa, and Europe – linkage over land and across sea between Europe and the Indian Sub-continent on the one side and Africa and India on the other side, it offers the shortest and cheapest trade and transit routes between the West and the East. It commands a vast reservoir of oil – about 60 percent of the world's proven reserves of oil – which enormously contributes to the affluence of the United States.


Author(s):  
Paul Musgrave ◽  
Daniel H. Nexon

This chapter addresses the complex and contingent interplay between liberal order and empire. It draws attention to the seemingly irresolvable dilemma that the United States maintains imperial relations with other political communities, whilst also rejecting the legitimacy of empire. The solution has been to ‘democratize’ imperial functions and to vest them in multilateral international organizations and to ensure that they as much as possible reflect the consent of the international community. Deploying an original framework of analysis based on ideal types of empire, the chapter advances the argument that imperial structures may be found embedded in at least three different variations of imperial logics in surprising settings, including inter-governmentalist liberal practices in UN peacekeeping operations and neo-trustee arrangements, such as those following the NATO intervention in Kosovo and NATO's role in Afghanistan.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-255
Author(s):  
Ahmed El Morabety

This paper addresses Morocco's defence diplomacy through a consideration of two research matters. The first concerns the military and security cooperation of the country with the United States, the European countries, as well as the Arab and African ones. The second focuses on Morocco's participations in United Nations and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) peacekeeping operations. The objective of this study is essentially to show to what extent Morocco contributes to restoring regional peace and security across the world.


Author(s):  
Kseniya Oksamytna ◽  
Magnus Lundgren

Abstract Contemporary peacekeeping operations carry out many disparate tasks, which has triggered a debate about “Christmas Tree mandates.” Did the UN Secretariat or the UN Security Council drive this expansion? Using original data on nineteen UN peacekeeping missions, 1998–2014, this article compares peacekeeping tasks recommended by the Secretariat to those mandated by the Council. It finds that the two bodies expressed different preferences regarding the nature, number, and novelty of peacekeeping tasks. First, the Council dropped Secretariat-recommended tasks as often as it added new ones on its own initiative. Second, the two bodies disagreed more over peacebuilding and peacemaking tasks than over peacekeeping tasks. Third, the Council preferred to be the one to introduce novel tasks that had not appeared in previous mandates. Finally, among the countries that “held the pen” on peacekeeping resolutions, the United States was the most prone to dropping Secretariat-proposed tasks and the least willing to add tasks itself.


1994 ◽  
Vol 33 (4I) ◽  
pp. 327-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard G. Lipsey

I am honoured to be invited to give this lecture before so distinguished an audience of development economists. For the last 21/2 years I have been director of a project financed by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and composed of a group of scholars from Canada, the United States, and Israel.I Our brief is to study the determinants of long term economic growth. Although our primary focus is on advanced industrial countries such as my own, some of us have come to the conclusion that there is more common ground between developed and developing countries than we might have first thought. I am, however, no expert on development economics so I must let you decide how much of what I say is applicable to economies such as your own. Today, I will discuss some of the grand themes that have arisen in my studies with our group. In the short time available, I can only allude to how these themes are rooted in our more detailed studies. In doing this, I must hasten to add that I speak for myself alone; our group has no corporate view other than the sum of our individual, and very individualistic, views.


2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo

By identifying two general issues in recent history textbook controversies worldwide (oblivion and inclusion), this article examines understandings of the United States in Mexico's history textbooks (especially those of 1992) as a means to test the limits of historical imagining between U. S. and Mexican historiographies. Drawing lessons from recent European and Indian historiographical debates, the article argues that many of the historical clashes between the nationalist historiographies of Mexico and the United States could be taught as series of unsolved enigmas, ironies, and contradictions in the midst of a central enigma: the persistence of two nationalist historiographies incapable of contemplating their common ground. The article maintains that lo mexicano has been a constant part of the past and present of the US, and lo gringo an intrinsic component of Mexico's history. The di erences in their historical tracks have been made into monumental ontological oppositions, which are in fact two tracks—often overlapping—of the same and shared con ictual and complex experience.


Screen Bodies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-37
Author(s):  
David Yagüe González

The behaviors and actions that an individual carries out in their daily life and how they are translated by their society overdetermine the gender one might have—or not—according to social norms. However, do the postulates enounced by feminist and queer Western thinkers still maintain their validity when the context changes? Can the performances of gender carry out their validity when the landscape is other than the one in Europe or the United States? And how can the context of drag complicate these matters? These are the questions that this article will try to answer by analyzing the 2015 movie Viva by Irish director Paddy Breathnach.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Holslag

The chapter argues that India has a strong interest to balance China and that the two Asian giants will not be able grow together without conflict. However, India will not be able to balance China’s rise. The chapter argues that India remains stuck between nonalignment and nonperformance. On the one hand, it resists the prospect of a new coalition that balances China from the maritime fringes of Eurasia, especially if that coalition is led by the United States. On the other hand, it has failed to strengthen its own capabilities. Its military power lags behind China’s, its efforts to reach out to both East and Central Asia have ended in disappointment, and its economic reforms have gone nowhere. As a result of that economic underachievement, India finds itself also torn between emotional nationalism and paralyzing political fragmentation, which, in turn, will further complicate its role as a regional power.


This chapter reviews the books Fútbol, Jews and the Making of Argentina (2014), by Raanan Rein, translated by Marsha Grenzeback, and Muscling in on New Worlds: Jews, Sport, and the Making of the Americas (2014), edited by Raanan Rein and David M.K. Sheinin. Rein’s book deals with the “making” of Argentina through football (soccer), while Muscling in on New Worlds focuses on the “making” of the Americas (mainly the one America, called the United States) through sports. Muscling in on New Worlds is a collection of essays that seeks to advance the common theme of sport as “an avenue by which Jews threaded the needle of asserting a Jewish identity.” Topics include Jews as boxers, Jews and football, Jews and yoga, Orthodox Jewish athletes, and American Jews and baseball. There are also essays about the cinematic and literary representations of Jews in sports.


Author(s):  
Richard Gowan

During Ban Ki-moon’s tenure, the Security Council was shaken by P5 divisions over Kosovo, Georgia, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine. Yet it also continued to mandate and sustain large-scale peacekeeping operations in Africa, placing major burdens on the UN Secretariat. The chapter will argue that Ban initially took a cautious approach to controversies with the Council, and earned a reputation for excessive passivity in the face of crisis and deference to the United States. The second half of the chapter suggests that Ban shifted to a more activist pressure as his tenure went on, pressing the Council to act in cases including Côte d’Ivoire, Libya, and Syria. The chapter will argue that Ban had only a marginal impact on Council decision-making, even though he made a creditable effort to speak truth to power over cases such as the Central African Republic (CAR), challenging Council members to live up to their responsibilities.


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