Short Abstract

As global power shifts fracture traditional aid systems, this panel explores how South-South Cooperation reshapes African agency, revealing both new possibilities and hierarchies in reimagining development beyond the North–South paradigm.

Description

The rise of new development actors such as China, India, and the Gulf States is transforming the global aid landscape and unsettling the moral authority of Western-led development paradigms. This panel interrogates whether South-South Cooperation (SSC) signifies a genuine epistemic and structural break from the conditionalities and paternalism of traditional Official Development Assistance (ODA), or whether it merely reconfigures hierarchies under the banner of “win-win” partnership.

Focusing on African experiences, the panel explores how states navigate this fractured geopolitical terrain through strategies of multi-alignment—leveraging competition among donors to assert agency, negotiate sovereignty, and reshape development agendas. Yet, these shifting alliances also expose new dependencies, as seen in debt vulnerabilities, resource extraction patterns, and uneven technology transfers.

By juxtaposing the discourses of “non-interference” and “mutual benefit” against material realities, we ask: does SSC enable a more pluralistic, justice-oriented development order—or does it entrench alternative forms of strategic influence?

Aligned with the conference’s call to rethink development’s epistemic limits and complicities, this panel situates SSC within broader debates about the adequacy of “development” itself as a framework for justice and transformation. In a world marked by multipolarity and contesting futures, we interrogate not only who shapes Africa’s development trajectories, but also whether the very grammar of aid and progress can be reimagined—or transcended.

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