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Peripheral Social Formations in the New Division of Labour: African States in the Mid-1980s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Timothy M. Shaw
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Extract

If the study of the foreign policies of underdeveloped countries is underdeveloped, the systematic analysis of their foreign policy decisions is not. It is simply nonexistent. – Bahgat Korany, 1984 1

The first half of the 1980s has posed new challenges for African foreign policy in practice and analysis, symbolised by the Ethiopian drought and the conflict in Southern Africa, but generalised in the continental crisis of negative growth. The halcyon days of the 1960s – the innocence and optimism of early African nationalism – have long since disappeared, obliterated by the global and regional shocks of the 1970s. The first independence decade coincided with a period of gradual economic expansion – as it turned out, the continent's last. The years since the mid-1970s – the end of the post-war Bretton Woods era – have been characterised by slow growth at best, for a minority of states, and by none for the majority of countries and peoples. Thus the African agenda has shifted dramatically from nation-building to -salvaging, and from import-substitution to de-industrialisation. Somewhat fanciful notions of regional and continental integration have been replaced by pragmatic imperatives of food aid and debt relief.

Type
Review Article
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , September 1986 , pp. 489 - 508
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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References

Page 489 note 1 Korany, Bahgat, ‘Foreign Policy in the Third World: an introduction’, in International Political Science Review (Beverly Hills), 5, 1984, p. 7.Google Scholar

Page 491 note 1 See ‘70th Birthday Tribute to Basil Davidson’, in Third World Book Review (London), 1, 3, 1985, pp. 6–13.Google Scholar

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Page 494 note 1 Dessouki and Korany, ‘A Literature Survey and a Framework for Analysis’, p. 2.

Page 495 note 1 Dessouki, and Korany, , ‘Foreign Policy Process in the Arab World’, p. 329. One of them has since offered a comparative collection in response to the suggestion: Bahgat, Korany (ed.) How Foreign Policy Decisions are Made in the Third World: a comparative analysis (Boulder, 1986).Google Scholar

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Page 496 note 1 See, for example, Gavshon, Arthur, Crisis in Africa: battleground of East and West (Harmondsworth, 1981).Google Scholar Cf. the rather ahistoric and static collection for the Council on Foreign Relations by Foltz, William J. and Bienen, Henry S. (eds.), Arms and the African: military influences on Africa's international relations (New Haven, 1985).Google Scholar

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Page 498 note 2 Gromyko et al. op. cit. p. 198.

Page 498 note 3 Ibid. p. 75.

Page 499 note 1 Freund, op. cit. pp. 14–15.Google Scholar

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Page 500 note 2 Ibid. pp. 169 and 76.

Page 501 note 1 See my attempt to focus on economy rather than on ecology, and on the informal rather than the formal sector, in ‘Towards a Political Economy of the African Crisis: diplomacy, debates and dialectics’, in Michael, Glantz and Maria, Kranz (eds.), Denying Famine a Future: drought and hunger in Africa (New York, 1986), ch. 7.Google Scholar

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Page 503 note 2 Ali E. Hillal Dessouki, ‘The Limits of Instrumentalism: Islam in Egypt's foreign policy’, in ibid. p. 85.

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Page 504 note 2 Gromyko et al. op. cit. p. 51.

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Page 505 note 3 See Shaw, Towards a Political Economy for Africa, pp. 105–6.

Page 506 note 1 Munck, op.cit. pp. 64, 353, and 358. For a very promising attempt to supply such a nuanced perspective to African cases, see Lubeck, Paul M. (ed.), The African Bourgeoisie: development in Nigeria, Kenya and Ivory Coast (Boulder), forthcoming.Google Scholar

Page 507 note 1 See Robin, Cohen (ed.), African Islands and Enclaves (Beverly Hills, 1983).Google Scholar

Page 507 note 2 On the importance of the informal sector, see Naomi, Chazan and Donald, Rothchild (eds.), The Reordering of the State in Africa (Boulder, 1986),Google Scholar and Naomi, Chazan and Shaw, Timothy M. (eds.), Coping in Africa's Food Crisis: comparative cases and popular responses (Boulder, forthcoming).Google Scholar

Page 507 note 3 See, for example, new yet orthodox texts by Hodder-Williams, Richard, An Introduction to the Politics of Tropical Africa (London, 1984),Google Scholar and Tordoff, William, Government and Politics in Africa (Bloomington, 1984).Google Scholar

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