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ID:
160058
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article discusses the changing attitudes of African states towards the governance of their mining sectors, with states seeking to assert their sovereignty through a greater agency in their mineral resources. These attitudes are strongly echoed by regional governance norms such as the Africa Mining Vision an initiative led by the African Union since 2009. I suggest that the main drivers of these changes are collective agents that transcend the realm of the state. Building on Tom Long's tripartite categorization of small state power (“derivative power”, “particular-intrinsic power”, and “collective power”) to the analysis, I highlight Africa's current mining reforms as the outcome of a collective power to shape its mining sector vis-á-vis global structures. The article discusses these changes primarily through IR scholarship on the ‘Rise of the Rest’ and on small states agency.
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| 2 |
ID:
167193
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| Summary/Abstract |
The past decade has been characterised (among other things) by the emergence of a discourse about the ‘Rise of the Rest’. (Some) non-Western states have been described as ‘rising powers’ capable of agency in the international system and as potential partners for the West in global governance. This stands in contrast to a more traditional narrative that saw the non-West primarily as a source of international problems and a developmental project. Does this discursive shift signify a historic reversal in how the non-West understood by the West? The answer is complicated. In this article, I argue that the hype about ‘rising powers’ in Western policy circles following the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2008 had little relation to an ‘objective’ analysis of actual structural shifts in favour of ‘the Rest’ and was more akin to a financial bubble, with speculation driving perceptions of ‘rising powers’. I also show that the ‘rising powers’ literature is better located within the broader (and long-standing) debate about the decline of the United States, and should be read more as a manifestation of American anxieties and hopes than as informing us about the choices or the motivations of the ‘rising powers’. Ironically, however, the Western hype nevertheless has helped along a structural shift that is under way, first by partly moulding reality in that direction (especially in the form of financial decisions), but more importantly by freeing non-Western powers (for better or worse) from their internalised cages of perceived inferiority and lack of agency in the modern international order.
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