African Agency in International Politics

William Brown, Sophie Harman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134057542
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book analyses the rapidly increasing role of African states, leaders and other political actors in international politics in the 21st Century.

In contrast to the conventional approach of studying how external actors impacted on Africa's international relations, this book seeks to open up a new approach, focusing on the impact of African political actors on international politics. It does this by analysing African agency – the degree to which African political actors have room to manoeuvre within the international system and exert influence internationally, and the uses they make of that room for manoeuvre. Bringing together leading scholars from Africa and Europe to explore the role and conception of African Agency, this book addresses a wide range of issues, from relations with western and non-western donors, Africa's role in the UN and World Trade Organisation, negotiations over climate change, trade agreements with the European Union, regional diplomatic strategies, the character and extent of African state agency, and agency within corporate social responsibility initiatives.

African Agency in International Politics will be of interest to scholars and students of Africa's international relations, African politics, development, geography, diplomacy, trade, the environment, political science and security studies.

1 African agency in international politics

William Brown and Sophie Harman

The study of Africa's international relations has for a long time been dominated by a concern to explain how the continent has been governed, shaped and marginalised by external actors. In periods of economic crisis and political upheaval (much of the 1980s and 1990s), in which powerful outside actors were prominent, this approach was perhaps understandable, if misguided. Even in those years, the portrayal of Africa as the inert victim of exogenous forces bound by immovable structural constraints was always a limited understanding of inter national relations in the region. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, when African actors established a sustained track record of assertive, high level diplomacy and during which the continent has seen long term economic growth, this approach has started to look ever more anachronistic. For this is an era in which African states, leaders and diplomats have been centrally engaged in global negotiations over climate change, world trade, aid disbursal and intervention norms, in which African politicians have made strategic choices in how they reshape existing relations with Western donors and fashioned new relationships with rising powers, and one in which African non state actors have been critical both to the definition and implementation of policies in fields as diverse as governance, security, health, environment and migration. It is high time that we approach Africa's international relations from a different perspective.

This book seeks to open up such a starting point for the analysis of Africa's international relations by turning the established approach on its head. Rather than asking how do external actors determine African realities, we ask how far, and in what ways, African political actors are impacting on, and operating within, the international system? What are the key sites and sources of agency in Africa? What does African agency look like and how can we understand it? The shift is an important one. But it is not an effort to deny the very obviously tight corners which constrain Africa's choices within the international system.¹ These constraints, whether in the form of great powers, structures of economic dis advantage or disabling discourses, are real and persistent. However, analysis that begins with such constraints always struggles to articulate any real engagement with the political actions of those operating within these tight corners. A new starting point is, therefore, more of a signal of intellectual intent. It is an intention to take African politics, actions, preferences, strategies and purposes seriously, to get beyond the tired tropes of an Africa that is victimised, chaotic, violent and poor. It is also an intent to focus on interaction, rather than one way domination; tensions between reproduction and transformation of structured relationships, rather than recurrence and repetition.

The content of this book, and the beginnings of such analysis, stems from a series of seminars sponsored by the United Kingdom (UK) Economic Social Research Council (ESRC) in 2011.² This series of seminars sought to approach Africa's international politics from the standpoint of how African actors exert agency in international negotiations; in peace, conflict and intervention processes; in transnational security issues; as well as reflecting upon the implications of African agency for international relations (IR) theory and Southern African perspectives on this. This book presents a range of research arising from different perspectives on African agency and on a diverse set of issues. These are all motivated by a desire to look at Africa's international relations from a new perspective, to break away from the important, yet determinist, structural accounts of Africa's international relations to question how African actors impact on the international system.

Agency and Africa

This book seeks to effect such a turnaround in perspective by beginning with a focus on agency. Tackling questions of agency has a number of effects on the kind of analytical project we construct. For one, it returns to the desire to look at international relations ‘from the bottom up’, as, in different ways, both Clapham (1996) and Bayart (1993) have done in the past. Second, it puts the issues of political action by and purposes of African actors to the fore in our analysis by engaging with the constrained choices they face and respond to. Third, it encourages greater engagement with those areas of fluidity, change and transformation as exist in African's international relations. Finally, a focus on agency sheds light on those political actors and processes often ignored or unseen and accounts for difference and alternative spaces of political engagement within the inter national system.

As we will explore further, there are at least two groups of questions around agency that contributions to this volume explore. The first approaches agency as a question about how much influence or power is being exerted and how much freedom of action African political actors have available to them. This group of questions involves enquiries into where and how African agents are making an impact on international politics and an identification of those factors, whether at the level of the international system or in domestic politics, which enable or con strain that influence. In this respect, it is worth pointing out that an analytical focus on agency does not presume any premature conclusions that African agents are necessarily having a significantly greater impact than at some previous time. It can certainly be argued, as suggested above, that there are issue areas where African agency seen in this way has increased; however, this is not a view shared by all observers, nor is it necessarily true in all fields. Indeed, authors differ considerably in their assessments of African agency in contemporary circumstances. A focus on agency seen as an ability to influence or exert power does not, therefore, simply invert the conventional approach to stress an unconstrained voluntaristic view of agency, as Mamdani warned: ‘. . . it is only when abstracted from structural constraint that agency appears as lacking in historical specificity’ (Mamdani 1996: 10–11). What it does do is prompt us to identify such room for manoeuvre as exists and to explain the forces at work that open or close down those spaces.

Analysis of agency also calls on us to explain what might be done with that room for manoeuvre. As a result, the second group of questions of agency is more concerned with explaining the kind of agency that is being enacted. This is both in terms of identification of the specific agents at work (organisations, states, leaders or civil society actors), the social context within which they act and, therefore, the political purposes they carry into the international arena (what is it that they seek to achieve or change; whose interests are being pursued). This necessitates consideration of the tools actors use to enact agency within the con texts in which they operate in and in pursuit of specific goals. This could be a reassertion of sovereign claims to governance, the playing of identity politics to garner the support of a specific population, naming and shaming of those that do not seek the same objectives or the use of force or financial bargaining and leverage. In many ways, African agency is different from other forms of agency, because of the nature the structural constraints on that agency. However, as this book argues, such constraints do not eclipse agency altogether; it just means that the tools and sites of such agency may differ and offer something new for our understanding.

Before seeing how this analytical turnaround might shape different African diplomatic investigations, however, we need also to pause to consider the use of the term ‘Africa’. Why focus on Africa? And to what extent can we even talk about an ‘African’ agency at all without slipping into the very same stereotypes we are trying to escape?

Africa is, in some senses, an exemplar of minor powers or ‘small states’ in the international system. As such, it provides a set of cases through which to explore the view of international relations that begins somewhere other than with the great powers. Notwithstanding the understandable focus of much IR on great powers, Africa does, in fact, matter for a range of policy areas, particularly those involving multilateral forums, international collective action or areas where there are marked relations of interdependence between the continent and outside powers. Africa matters in setting the global trade agenda, peace and conflict mitigation, discussions on rising powers and human security threats, such as climate change and health. In exploring questions of agency in international politics, Africa serves as something of a limit case – if anywhere might be characterised as most bound by existing structures of power, it is surely Africa. Major shifts in the polarity of the international system have not been significantly affected, or effected, by African states, and significant structures of economic and political governance appear to remain stubbornly resistant to programmes of change from any other than the biggest powers. Thus, it is important to consider why this is the case and how smaller African states can nevertheless exert influence or effect change.

Such arguments also draw us into a more fundamental question that has to be addressed before developing ideas about African agency, namely, to what extent we can speak of Africa as a singular whole. Indeed, any attempt to define a field described as broadly as this one is bound to run the risk of partiality and over generalisation. To speak of African agency, of course, is a non starter if that were taken unproblematically to be a unified and undifferentiated agency in international politics. Although a history of colonisation is part of the shared history of almost all African states, as Harrison argues, even here the diversity of experience and diversity of the impacts of colonialism make this a unity based on the ‘broadest of sweeps’ (Harrison 2010: 15). Aside from that, one might talk of an African agency in terms of the instances of collective assertion by African states of influence in the international arena, something we will look at in greater depth later, but which, as Zondi notes in his chapter, has a patchy record at best. A third notion of an African agency is more discursive, in the way that Africa is constructed as an entity both by outsiders and by African political actors and intellectuals (Harrison 2010: 16–17). This arises, in particular, in the realm of development policy, where common problems and solutions are frequently ascribed to ‘Africa’ as a whole.

Assessing agency at this more generalised level therefore invites analysis of African agency in three senses. First are the concrete impact of African states acting collectively and the nature of that collective action in international forums. Second is the range of very different actors coming from the continent and who are identified by others, or by themselves, in some senses as African. Finally, there is the extent to which Africa as a category is utilised by African and non African actors to construct forms of political action internationally. This latter sense includes questions about whether such constructions create opportunities or constraint for such African collective action or individual state projects, as well as the ways in which African political actors themselves, both state and non-state, utilise the notion of ‘Africa’ as a means to define and extend their actions in the external world.

Arenas and extent of African agency

The range of arenas within which African political actors exert their influence is wide and contributions to this book represent an initial, but necessarily incomplete, exploration of some of the key arenas that the study of African agency in international politics has to engage with. Broadly, they focus on four, sometimes overlapping, locations: multilateral intergovernmental negotiations; bilateral relations with external powers; a realm of intra-regional cooperation and fields of sub state or transnational political action.

First, and most obvious to external observers, are the highly visible African interventions on the global stages of the United Nations (UN), World Trade Organisation (WTO) and international financial institutions, such as the World Bank. All three of these have witnessed an upsurge in developing country assertiveness, within which African participation has been important. With the end of the Cold War and an increasingly active Security Council, the legitimacy and representativeness of the UN came into question. As Zondi points out in his chapter on international negotiations, as the largest regional block of countries – one-quarter of the UN membership – Africa has been among those clamouring for a reform of the inherited post Second World War structures. However, it has been within the more specific policy areas of world trade and climate change that African numbers have been made to count for more. In the WTO, African states have moved from playing a critical, but relatively passive, role to engaging in a concerted effort to increase influence, build capacity to scrutinise proposals and to reject those which run counter to the declared developmental goals of the post Seattle Doha ‘Development’ Round. Such prominence was also displayed to a world audience as South Africa joined the emerging powers of Brazil, China and India in the critical stages of the Copenhagen conference on climate change in 2009. And, contrary to expectations, South Africa followed this up by hosting what, by climate change standards, was a relatively successful summit in Durban in 2011. Over and above these examples, African states have also played important roles in negotiations around international efforts to control conflict diamonds, landmines and trade in small arms and toxic waste, among others (Shaw et al. 2012). African membership, specifically South African member ship, of the G20, new alliances, such as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), and prominence in the UN General Assembly all add to the growing presence of African actors in international decision making and diplomacy (Cornelissen 2009).

Less prominent, but often of more direct and immediate impact, has been a growing assertiveness of African states within the varied bilateral relationships they are involved in. This is not least in terms of relations with Western aid donors. It is in aid relationships, above all, that the image of the 1980s and 1990s – of a group of countries totally subservient to the external dictates and policy whims of Western states and the Bretton Woods institutions – took hold most strongly. While more careful studies of donor influence have unpicked parts of that image (Mosley et al. 1991; Killick 1998; Whitfield 2009), there is, nevertheless, a sense that even where African governments have shown resistance to particular donor interventions, this was often piecemeal and short term, rather than concerted and strategic. This is still the case for some countries. However, for others, the twenty-first century has seen a much more overt effort to redefine the relationship with donors, from forging a new partnership at the global level via the G8, to national efforts to control and direct donor activity. Rwanda and Uganda both demonstrate this assertiveness very clearly, and three chapters in this volume assess the strategic thinking of the Kampala and Kigale governments in managing their external linkages. However, such bilateral relationships extend also to the security field, with which they overlap in many respects. The renewed importance of some African countries to post 9/11 Western policy has given added sources of leverage, which has been utilised, especially by countries like Uganda. In Uganda, Fisher argues in his chapter ‘ “Image management” and African agency’, Museveni has combined diplomatic manoeuvring and image management, in order to create greater space to define relations with the West. It is these emerging sites and tools of African agency that present new insights into how we understand agency in international politics.

Sitting somewhere between these two is a third arena of regional and sub regional activity. This has been centred on the African Union (AU), but also encompasses the various sub-regional organisations operating in the fields of security and economic integration. The arrival of the African Union in 2002 was a significant statement of a new era in African diplomacy, extending from the global stages down to the management of sub regional processes and relation ships. Indeed, the formation of the AU has given African states a platform from which to participate internationally, as well as forming the basis of a new phase of the management of intra regional matters. As such, it has been central both to ideas of an African renaissance and of finding African solutions to African problems (see Williams 2011). While old problems persist – underfunding, lack of capacity and the inability to live up to grand declarations being among them – the AU, despite being work in progress, has made a step change in the ability of Africa to act collectively, both within the region and outside of it (Coleman 2011; Engel and Porto 2010; Williams 2009).

Finally, African agency is enacted in a diverse set of arenas at a greater remove from the formal state based and intergovernmental areas. Non state and trans national actors interact, either directly or mediated via national states, with inter national organisations and agencies of various kinds. This is apparent in the aid, environmental and health fields where non-state actors are critical to the successful implementation of the policies of both national and international organisations. They also have the capacity, as in issues relating to the drugs trade and migration, to shape policy agendas themselves (as Hammerstad (2012) has explored, in relation to migration, security and South African foreign policy). Away from the direct intergovernmental dealings with states in the aid and security fields, it is often ‘non-state’ actors and processes of migration, environmental change, trade and fin ancial linkages that help to define the interdependencies that Africa experiences with Western states. This overcomes one of the central limitations of understanding agency – a reassertion of a preoccupation with states, specifically the African state – in order to shift the focus to a plethora of political activity that has an impact on both national and international policy. Moreover, transnational or non state sites of agency have become a preoccupation of the international community seeking to build ‘good governance’. For some external actors, the agency of non state actors is of primary importance in the promotion of democracy in Africa. Therefore, it is important to consider how non state actors operate within the parameters of what is seen as appropriate agency by international actors and to what extent non state actors challenge this appropriateness and offer an alternative idea of agency.

Even if there is some agreement on the range of locations within which African agency is being enacted, contributions to this volume differ in their assessments of the extent of African agency, both within each of these locations and between them. For example, while, for Donna Lee, the WTO has seen sustained African efforts to participate fully in the Doha Development Round to some considerable effect in negotiations on cotton among other areas, Stephen Hurt argues that this success has come at a price. Confronted by developing country assertiveness in the global forum, major powers have shifted their focus to bilateral and regional deals exemplified by the European Union's (EU) negotiation of Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with African sub regional groupings where it is better able to constrain African bargaining power. For Zondi, also, steps forward in African collective influence in UN reform and climate change negotiations won through the formation of common negotiating positions have been weakened by the persistence of strong and divergent national preferences. Fisher, Beswick and Grimm all outline ways in which weak African states are able to actively manage relations with much more powerful allies through image management, balancing of threats and active coordination, respectively. However, they all recognise limitations to these strategies. In reviewing the UK's role, Tom Cargill argues that while boosting Africa's standing in policy circles under Tony Blair's premiership, the UK has been inconsistent, often presuming to speak for Africa and Africans. In making more general assessments, Andreasson sees state weakness in Africa as persistently undercut ting attempts by the continent's governments to exert themselves in a hostile international system.

These divergent takes on the extent of African agency emphasise the multiple determinants of agency within global politics and reinforce the argument that the analytical focus on African agency does not presume a picture of increasing African influence. Indeed, one of the messages of the contributions to this book is that the picture is very mixed, issue-specific and fluid. However, the...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• African Agency in International Politics
• Routledge studies on African politics and international relations
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 African agency in international politics
• PART I Negotiating internationally
• PART II Agency: New modes, new sites
• PART III States and agency
• Bibliography
• Index