The New Scramble for Africa (review)

What explains China's decision to send navy warships to the coast of Somalia to participate in a multi-country military effort to minimize piracy? To date, China's formal, multilateral peacekeeping operations in sub-Saharan Africa have been in noncombat-related support positions and have been hugely disproportionate to the size of its military and to the contributions that countries like Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh have made. At a time when China's international cooperation with Western countries on security and environmental issues is unusual or fraught, its participation in a multi-country military patrol of the Gulf of Aden seems anomalous.

Pádraig Carmody's impressive new book reveals that the events in the Gulf of Aden are not so much unusual as simply a visible expression of a dramatic change in the way that historically dominant Western nations and non-Western nations are exercising their interests in Africa. One comes to appreciate that China's participation in policing the Gulf of Aden is, like other countries actively engaged in African states, motivated by a dominant economic rationale: to keep trade routes open and to ensure continued access to African resources. While the naval patrols are an overt expression of Chinese, European, United States, and Indian efforts (among others) to maintain the global flow of commodities, Carmody's book reveals just how deeply Africa is intertwined in the reordering of global economic and political relations.

Attention to China's role in Africa has been mounting in recent years, with media coverage of its relationship with Sudan, for example, and due to international nongovernmental organizations reporting on an increasing number of international firms being given or leasing vast tracts of land for export-oriented agricultural production in various countries such as Ethiopia. But what has been less acknowledged is how China's engagement with Africa has evolved; how it compares to that of countries with deep historic, often colonial ties to the African subcontinent; and how other emerging, dominant economies like Brazil and India are also competing for influence and resource access in Africa.

Carmody engages with existing theories and arguments about development and underdevelopment in Africa, and challenges readers to consider the outcome of China's "flexigemonic" relationship with African states (p. 76); that is, its unwillingness to force African states to change their behavior and to instead work through and with existing governments to gain access to resources and markets. The argument presented is not that traditional, often colonial, countries are losing their place or minimizing their presence in Africa—France, for example, maintains 60,000 troops in Africa—but that the presence of Brazil, India, and China, in particular, is altering how all non-African states engage with African governments, and how resource access, extraction, and processing factor into this evolution.

From the comprehensive review of competing explanations of Africa's bilateral relations and underdevelopment, to chapters addressing, fish, timber, uranium, coltan, export processing zones, oil, land, and diamonds, the book offers countless vivid examples for why a new set of analytical tools is needed to understand Africa's place in the global politics of resources. Carmody mines existing literature and evidence on bilateral engagement with African states and complements this with independent fieldwork in several countries. In this way, the book parallels an excellent review article: it engages with a rich diversity of theory and evidence, presents a herculean compilation of information, and raises many unanswered questions that can serve as a guide for future research. Not surprisingly, when a book covers this much theoretical ground, addresses an area of research that is underexplored, and presents this volume of evidence on so many sectors and countries, the opportunity to delve deeply into critical observations and questions is reduced.

For example, one of the richest chapters in the book, based on primary research, is one that examines China's engagement in Zambia. After explaining China's opening of economic zones in the country and providing evidence of local resistance to the zones and Chinese in...