Sudan Looks East: China, India and the politics of Asian alternatives ed. by Daniel Large and Luke Patey (review)

From its very outset, the welter of academic literature on resurgent Africa-Asia relations has had a broadly corrective feel. Scholars rightly attempt to interrogate reductive and tendentious Western representations of vulnerable African nations and rapacious Chinese neo-colonialism. They disaggregate the opportunities and challenges for Africans that emerge from the competitive interest of a range of Asian suitors. They emphasize the power of African agency in shaping this brave new world. The nuances of this politics of choice - 'an Africa that can say no' in the words of Chris Alden - are debated with increasing sophistication in academia and African civil society fora, if not yet in the media outlets on which many of the dominant panoramic studies are based. Nevertheless, one might have detected a certain waning of momentum in much of this literature, given the relative lack of empirical case studies testing the speculations painted at the macro level. In this sense, this excellent volume makes one of the most telling interventions of the last few years.

The book comprises ten detailed and judicious chapters, many of which naturally concern the politics of Sudan's oil relations with Asian rising powers. But, crucially, the volume also highlights the wider gamut of Chinese, Indian and Malaysian contact with Sudanese citizens, markets and political economy. Perhaps most rewarding is the fashion in which much of the book, particularly the tight introduction, looks to the history of 'South-South' relations as a meaningful driver of today's political practice. This sympathetic and sustained view of the longer historical durée better enables readers to engage the tapestry of dynamic relations between various Asian rising powers and Sudanese elites. It also convincingly demonstrates how all such liaisons are powerfully conditioned by the imperatives of Sudan's political economy. This line of argument is not new, but the skilful way in which historical complexities are laid out in the introduction provides one of the most significant examples of this scholarship to date. It is especially pleasing that several authors have also been able to fire the opening analytical salvo on South Sudan's Asian frontier, for example in reflecting on changing discourses of historical conviviality between China and the SPLM/A since the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement and subsequent independence.

The book makes the point that, despite the growing visibility of Sudan's relations with China, with all the accompanying anxieties over Darfur and executive authoritarianism, the actual mechanisms of Sudan's relations with China (and other Asian partners) are paradoxically relatively neglected. The rallying call here is to delve below elite state-to-state relations and remedy the fact that 'local perspectives across the country are lost in the flurry of international debate' (p. 2). It is here that the book falls a little short of its elegant introductory argumentative promise, despite making some substantial leaps. After encyclopaedic and generalist overviews of Sudan's historical foreign policy and oil industry, the book treats readers to a highly interesting window into the local impacts of oil production on Dinka and Shilluk communities in Southern Sudan after the CPA. This is based on copious local interview material, but greater analytical rigour emerging from the intriguing descriptive material would have been welcome. The author should, however, be commended for bringing such rare research to the public eye.

One should also praise the book for looking beyond China. Like some of the author's previous work, the chapter on India provides a rich account of how the Indian government negotiated access to Sudanese oil in the context of Chinese competition and domestic political constraint, deliberately eschewing the 'prism of Sudanese politics' (p. 88) on this occasion. The following chapter, by contrast, looks into political thought and the trajectories of 'Islamization' within Malaysia and Sudan, as opposed to the minutiae of economic relations. The chapter contains suggestive passages on the Islamic...