With the US and China competing for trade, influence, minerals, and technology, Africa is on the front line of a power struggle. But is the continent just a prize to be fought over? This book argues otherwise.

Experts from different fields show how African countries can avoid picking sides and assert their own strategic independence, even in a time of global chaos.

This edited volume discusses infrastructural cooperation and industrial cooperation between China and several countries in Africa. In contributions by academics and practitioners alike, the book distils the conceptual implications of empirical and ethnographic findings and explores probable future developments in the Africa-China relationship. The chapters deal with numerous countries across the African continent, covering nearly all regions, showcasing the dynamics of China’s relations with different countries while highlighting African agency over major infrastructure projects and industrial activity.  Providing an in-depth look at the evolving economic cooperation across these two regions, this volume will appeal to researchers and students of African politics, international relations, area studies, and comparative politics. The book will be of relevance to policymakers in governments, international organizations, and non-governmental organizations involved in policy formulation particularly regarding the Africa-China/China-Africa relationship.

This book discusses the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on international relations theories. As a phenomenon, AI is everywhere in the real world and growing. Through its transformative nature, it is simultaneously simplifying and complicating processes. Importantly, it also overlooks and "misunderstands". Globally, leaders, diplomats and policymakers have had to familiarise themselves and grapple with concepts such as algorithms, automation, machine learning, and neural networks. These and other features of modern AI are redefining our world, and with it, the long-held assumptions scholars of IR have relied on for their theoretical accounts of our universe. The book takes a historic, contemporary and long-term approach to explain and anticipate AI's impact on IR - and vice versa - through a systematic treatment of 9 theoretical paradigms and schools of thought including realism, liberalism, feminism, postcolonial theory and green theory. This book draws on original datasets, innovative empirical case studies and in-depth engagement with the core claims of the traditional and critical theoretical lenses to reignite debates on the nature and patterns of power, ethics, conflict, and systems among states and non-state actors.

This book comparatively examines the China-South Africa trade relationship over three decades through the prism of four other relationships South Africa has with states that have been China's most contentious neighbours in the Indo-Pacific (India, Japan, Taiwan and the USA). Asia is widely expected to be the new economic centre of gravity in international relations, particularly for trade. Yet despite the story of growth for both it and its neighbours, China ranks above all these countries in terms of trade partnership with South Africa and a majority of states across the globe. This poses a puzzle answerable only through in-depth analysis. In this way, this pathbreaking new book uses quantitative data to test commonly held assumptions about the 'new scramble for Africa' and shines a light on the driving forces, interests and sources of agency in South Africa's trade and foreign policies over the past three decades. The findings allow for the deduction of general patterns applicable to South Africa and peer economies, some of whom are benchmarked throughout the book for comparative insights.

This book examines the direction of the BRICS association. Beginning with historical analyses of the broader Global South and the fundamental composition of the BRICS countries and then moving on to present trends, The BRICS Order evaluates the variables that will influence the association's future. While the BRICS as a forum emerged as a result of the visible fragmentation of the post-1945 world order, it itself remains dogged by issues emanating from internal divergences among member states and from external factors. The contributors interrogate the extent to which this formation of "emerging economies" is indicative of a challenge to the West, or in fact a complimentary relation. Integral to these studies - which encompass examinations of such diverse areas as governance systems, issues in bilateral relations, security threats, multilateral institution building, the transnational creation and dissemination of knowledge, and technological innovation - are patterns of convergence and divergence which render the countries not a formal alliance, but as signifiers of a multilateral future in which the West is itself to become more heterogeneous and thus become occasionally complemented depending on the vacillating consensus within the BRICS association and on the interests of the BRICS countries at different points in time.

Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies in International Relations explores the geopolitics between technology and international relations. Through a focus on war, trade, investment flows, diplomacy, regional integration and development cooperation, this book takes a holistic perspective to examine the origins of technology, analysing its current manifestations in the contemporary world. The authors present the possible future roles of artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies (including blockchain, 3D printing, 5G connectivity and the Internet of Things) in the context of global arena.This book is essential reading to all who seek to understand the reality of the inequitable distribution of these game-changing technologies that are shaping the world. Research questions as well as some policy options for the developing world are explored and the authors make the case for cooperation by the international community as we enter the fourth industrial revolution.

This book comparatively examines the China–South Africa trade relationship over three decades through the prism of four other relationships South Africa has with states that have been China’s most contentious neighbours in the Indo-Pacific (India, Japan, Taiwan and the USA). Asia is widely expected to be the new economic centre of gravity in international relations, particularly for trade. Yet despite the story of growth for both it and its neighbours, China ranks above all these countries in terms of trade partnership with South Africa and a majority of states across the globe. This poses a puzzle answerable only through in-depth analysis. In this way, this pathbreaking new book uses quantitative data to test commonly held assumptions about the ‘new scramble for Africa’ and shines a light on the driving forces, interests and sources of agency in South Africa’s trade and foreign policies over the past three decades. The findings allow for the deduction of general patterns applicable to South Africa and peer economies, some of whom are benchmarked throughout the book for comparative insights.

This book examines the direction of the BRICS association. Beginning with historical analyses of the broader Global South and the fundamental composition of the BRICS countries and then moving on to present trends, The BRICS Order evaluates the variables that will influence the association's future. While the BRICS as a forum emerged as a result of the visible fragmentation of the post-1945 world order, it itself remains dogged by issues emanating from internal divergences among member states and from external factors. The contributors interrogate the extent to which this formation of "emerging economies" is indicative of a challenge to the West, or in fact a complimentary relation. Integral to these studies - which encompass examinations of such diverse areas as governance systems, issues in bilateral relations, security threats, multilateral institution building, the transnational creation and dissemination of knowledge, and technological innovation - are patterns of convergence and divergence which render the countries not a formal alliance, but as signifiers of a multilateral future in which the West is itself to become more heterogeneous and thus become occasionally complemented depending on the vacillating consensus within the BRICS association and on the interests of the BRICS countries at different points in time.