East Africa – Tim Zajontz

22. August 20248. September 2024

Contemporary Geopolitics-cum-Geoeconomics in East Africa: New Scrambles and Omni-alignments

New chapter, co-authored with Muhidin Shangwe, in the The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Geopolitics

Abstract

East Africa is firmly implicated in global geopolitics. This chapter is grounded in three theoretical premises about geopolitics. We posit that contemporary geopolitics in East Africa (and the “Global South” at large) are infused with enduring patterns of coloniality. Relatedly, geopolitics cannot be grasped in isolation from hierarchical, racialized, and spatialized power structures of the global economy, hence the neologism geopolitics-cum-geoeconomics. Thirdly, contemporary geopolitics in East Africa constitute a complex amalgamation of intraregional political, economic, and security dynamics and the region’s external relations and entanglements. Empirically, the chapter discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic has engendered vaccine geopolitics which have recently culminated in the EU’s efforts to export mRNA production to Rwanda. East Africa’s geopolitics of (in)security are dissected with reference to the regionalized conflict in the Eastern DRC and the growing military footprint of foreign powers in the greater East African region. The chapter furthermore documents repercussions of Russia’s war against Ukraine and problematizes growing foreign interests in East Africa’s “green” – and “not so green” – energy sources and the intensifying scramble for the region’s “critical” minerals. It is shown how infrastructural geopolitics related to East Africa’s integration into competing connectivity initiatives, notably China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the EU’s Global Gateway, and the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, have further curtailed regional integration. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the likelihood of “non-alignment 2.0” emanating from East Africa. Instead of coordinating a regional and decolonial geopolitical strategy, East African governments have opted to engage in “omni-alignment,” trying to maximize national dividends from the competitive and extractivist logics of contemporary geopolitics-cum-geoeconomics.

Link to the chapter

1. April 20221. November 2022

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.

Link to full text

14. February 202216. November 2023

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.

Link to full text