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‘Win-win’ contested: negotiating the privatisation of Africa’s Freedom Railway with the ‘Chinese of today’

New article out in the Journal of Modern African Studies

Abstract

As infrastructure development has become a key ingredient in Africa–China relations, the role of African governments in co-determining the design, funding and governance of the continent’s infrastructures has come under close scrutiny. This article sheds light on the rehabilitation of a symbol of Sino–African friendship: the Tanzania–Zambia Railway Authority (TAZARA). Employing Jessop’s strategic-relational approach, it is shown that the strategies of the shareholding governments in the negotiations with a Chinese consortium were informed by strategic learning from previous railway privatisations, corresponding cost–benefit analyses and reflection about Chinese commercial interests. Zambia’s indebtedness and Tanzania’s autocratic developmental state under President Magufuli formed crucial elements of the structural context in which the fate of Africa’s Freedom Railway was negotiated. The article transcends both crudely structuralist accounts of a supposedly all-powerful China and voluntarist conceptions of African agency that are void of structure. Assessing (African) agency requires analytical sensitivity towards the dialectical interaction between specific strategic capacities and strategically selective political–economic contexts.

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Infrastructure and the Politics of African State Agency: Shaping the Belt and Road Initiative in East Africa

New article, co-authored with Frangton Chiyemura and Elisa Gambino, in Chinese Political Science Review

Abstract

Infrastructure development has experienced a political renaissance in Africa and is again at the centre of national, regional, and continental development agendas. At the same time, China has been identified by African policy-makers as a particularly suitable strategic partner. As infrastructure has become a main pillar of Sino-African cooperation, there has been growing analytical interest in the role of African actors in shaping the terms and conditions and, by extension, the implementation of infrastructure projects with Chinese participation. This follows a more general African “agency turn” in China–Africa studies, which has shifted the research focus onto the myriad ways in which African state and non-state actors shape the continent’s engagements with China. This article is situated within this growing body of literature and explores different forms of African state agency in the context of Tanzania’s planned Bagamoyo port, Ethiopia’s Adama wind farms, and Kenya’s Lamu port. We posit a non-reductionist and social-relational ontology of the (African) state which sees the state as a multifaceted and multi-scalar institutional ensemble. We show that the extent and forms of state agency exerted are inherently interrelated with and, thus, highly contingent upon concrete institutional, economic, political, and bureaucratic contexts in which African state actors are firmly embedded. In doing so, we make the case for a context-sensitive analysis of various spheres of state agency in particular conjunctures of Sino-African engagement.

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Remembering Ian Taylor

Last year in February, Professor Ian Taylor of the University of St Andrews passed away after a short struggle with cancer. Ian was a world-renowned scholar in the fields of African Studies, International Relations and Global Political Economy. Besides his remarkable academic achievements, Ian was an extremely passionate educator as well as a kind, humorous and supportive colleague and friend to many of us. This is a modest attempt at paying tribute to an inspiring intellectual and true friend of Africa.

Together with his twin brother Eric, Ian grew up on the Isle of Man, before the family relocated to West London where he spent his teens and would become a die-hard Brentford FC supporter – in his words a ‘100% local club’. Whilst there were few points of contact to Africa on the small Crown dependency in the Irish Sea, Ian, early on, developed an interest in Africa, as he heard stories from his grandmother whose parents had lived in South Africa, and where a large network of relatives still live.

After reading History and Politics at what was then the Leicester Polytechnic, Ian used a gap year in 1991-92 for his first travel to southern Africa – obviously at quite a formative time for the region. This trip clearly left a firm impression on him, as he would return to the region throughout his life. However, first he joined Jo, the love of his life whom he met in South Africa, when she took up Ph.D studies at the University of Hong Kong in 1994. Ian enrolled himself for a Master’s there. His 368-pages M.Phil thesis on China’s foreign policy vis-à-vis Africa laid the cornerstone for one of his research specialisations and arguably also for a new sub-discipline, China-Africa studies. One of his first academic articles, an output from his M.Phil research, was published in the Journal of Modern African Studies and has since been cited 357 times (Taylor 1998). Exactly 18 years later, Ian became co-editor-in-chief of this prestigious journal, together with Ebenezer Obadare.

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Railway Imperialisms in East Africa: Laying the Tracks for Exploitation

New chapter out in The Oxford Handbook of Economic Imperialism, edited by Zak Cope and Immanuel Ness

Abstract
Physical infrastructure has been central to the century-long exploitation of Africa’s soil and peoples by external powers. This chapter sheds light on the pivotal role of railways in the political economies of historical and contemporary imperialisms in East Africa. It first recounts how rail infrastructure developments in Britain’s East Africa and Uganda Protectorates as well as in German East Africa fostered colonial primitive accumulation by forcing local and imported labour power to construct the means that would accelerate the theft of the continent’s natural wealth. In a second step, the chapter examines how contemporary infrastructure development in the region has continually served economic imperialisms. China’s transition from a provider of anti-imperial infrastructure, in the form of the Tanzania-Zambia Railway Authority (TAZARA), to a neo-imperial investor is problematized in the context of East Africa’s gradual integration into the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Drawing on David Harvey’s theorization of spatio-temporal fixes as a tendency inherent to capitalist imperialism, the chapter documents how debt-financed large-scale infrastructure projects, such as Kenya’s new Standard Gauge Railway, serve the geographical expansion of Chinese surplus capital and lock the region into Chinese-centred systems of accumulation. The chapter concludes that Africa’s contemporary infrastructure boom perpetuates the continent’s dependent integration into the global capitalist economy and facilitates new forms of accumulation by dispossession.

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Gerechtigkeit global gedacht

Rede beim Neujahrsempfang der SPD Uhingen am 9. Januar 2022

© Heidi Lorenz

(Es gilt das gesprochene Wort)

Sehr verehrte Damen und Herren,

zunächst einmal ganz herzlichen Dank an euch, Susanne und Michael, für die freundliche Einladung nach Uhingen zu eurem traditionsreichen Neujahrsempfang. Nicht nur ist es in den aktuellen Zeiten grundsätzlich schön, unter Einhaltung der notwendigen Maßnahmen persönlich zusammen zu kommen und sich auszutauschen. Schließlich sind wir alle soziale Wesen. Nein, es freut mich auch im Besonderen, mal wieder in Uhingen und in eurem tollen Uditorium zu sein.

Die heutige Neujahrsansprache ist überschrieben mit “Gerechtigkeit global gedacht“. Nun muss ich gleich zu Beginn sagen, dass sich dieses Thema tatsächlich nur mäßig dazu eignet, zu Beginn des Jahres gute Laune zu versprühen. Wir werden bereits von der allabendlichen Tagesschau daran erinnert, wie ungerecht es doch in vielerlei Hinsicht in Deutschland, an Europas Außengrenzen oder aber auf anderen Kontinenten zugeht. Trotzdem möchte ich in der nächsten knappen halben Stunde mit euch und Ihnen, ein wenig laut darüber nachdenken, warum es gerade vor dem Hintergrund aktueller Herausforderungen so wichtig ist, Fragen globaler Gerechtigkeit ins Zentrum gesellschaftlicher und politischer Debatten zu rücken. Ich werde dabei in der gebotenen Kürze einige globale Gerechtigkeitslücken ansprechen. Zugleich verspreche ich aber, mit einer optimistischen und hoffnungsvollen Note zu enden.

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Afrika im Fokus des dritten SPD-Sommerstammtisches

THOMAS REIFF

Um aktuelle politische und wirtschaftliche Entwicklungen auf dem afrikanischen Kontinent ging es beim jüngsten Stammtisch des SPD-Ortsvereins Geislingen im „Café im Grünen“. Als Referenten konnte der Ortsvereinsvorsitzende Thomas Reiff den Politologen und Mitbegründer des Geislinger Vereins „Freundeskreis Uganda e.V.“, Tim Zajontz, begrüßen.

© Jürgen Peters

Zajontz lehrt und forscht an den Universitäten in Freiburg und Stellenbosch in Südafrika zu den internationalen Beziehungen des afrikanischen Kontinents. Beim Stammtisch des Geislinger SPD-Ortsvereins teilte der Politikwissenschaftler nun Erfahrungen und Erkenntnisse, die er während teils mehrjähriger Aufenthalte im südlichen und östlichen Afrika sammeln konnte.

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Debt, distress, dispossession: towards a critical political economy of Africa’s financial dependency

New article in the Review of African Political Economy

Abstract
With China’s rise to become Africa’s largest bilateral creditor, much research has focused on an evidence-based critique of the politicised narrative about China’s supposed ‘debt trap diplomacy’. At a more fundamental level, this debate problematises the function of debt and related power differentials in late capitalism and calls into question development paradigms, notably the hegemonic infrastructure-led development regime, that have sustained Africa’s financial dependency into the 2020s. As the International Monetary Fund is yet again shuttling between Addis Ababa, Lusaka, and Nairobi to resurrect fiscal discipline and to ensure debtor compliance for the post-pandemic ‘payback period’, it is argued that (i) periodic cycles of debt financing, debt distress and structural adjustment are a systemic feature of the malintegration of Africa into the global capitalist economy, and (ii) critical research on the social costs and economic beneficiaries of renewed rounds of austerity and privatisation in Africa’s current debt cycle is needed.

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Capitalism and Africa’s (infra)structural dependency: A story of spatial fixes and accumulation by dispossession

New chapter, co-authored with Ian Taylor, in Africa and the Global System of Capital Accumulation, edited by Emmanuel O. Oritsejafor and Allan D. Cooper

Abstract
Instead of expediting “Africa’s transformation”, as suggested by the Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA) of the African Union (AU) (PIDA, n.d.), this chapter argues that the recent upsurge in infrastructure development has reinforced the continent’s dependency on external actors and fosters patterns of accumulation by dispossession. We are helped by David Harvey’s theory of spatio-temporal fixes and the key functions it attributes to infrastructure and debt in the global system of capital accumulation. The chapter proceeds in four stages. The chapter first briefly recounts Harvey’s concepts of the spatio-temporal fix and accumulation by dispossession. In a second step, we contextualize Africa’s recent infrastructure boom and situate it against the wider saga of “Africa rising.” The third part of the chapter scrutinizes China’s rise as the continent’s new “infrastructure giant” and problematizes particularities of the “Chinese infrastructural fix” in Africa. The chapter then concludes by extrapolating some trends that we believe will become increasingly relevant in Africa’s infrastructure sector and that underline the enduring function of infrastructure as “means of dispossession” (Cowen 2017).

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Interview on Chinese overseas investments in ports

These are some of the answers I gave when I was recently interviewed on Chinese overseas investments in Africa, Asia and Europe.

© Mikhail Goldovski, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0

What is your take on China’s massive investments in ports and maritime infrastructure? What is China’s game plan?

Chinese investments in port infrastructure all around the world are another testament to the current geographical reorganisation of the global economy. Investments in overseas ports play a crucial role in China’s foreign trade policy, as they facilitate China-oriented value chains and growth. Seaports like the ones in Gwadar, Hambantota, Djibouti or Piraeus are crucial logistics hubs to facilitate trade and trans-shipment along the Maritime Silk Road. However, to assume that Chinese port investments form part of a meticulously planned grand strategy would be misleading. Chinese port and logistics companies, such as China Merchants and COSCO Shipping, are meanwhile global players in a highly competitive market. They operate with a significant degree of independence from Beijing and, like their competitors, first and foremost aim at profit maximation.

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