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Paper short abstract

This paper examines South–South Cooperation in Africa as a diplomatic and developmental practice, asking whether it constitutes a break from Western aid or reproduces new hierarchies through debt, extraction, and strategic influence in a multipolar order.

Paper long abstract

This paper critically examines South–South Cooperation (SSC) in Africa as an emerging development paradigm within an increasingly multipolar global order. While SSC is commonly framed through discourses of non-interference and partnership, this paper asks whether it represents a substantive epistemic and structural departure from Western-led Official Development Assistance (ODA), or whether it reconfigures established hierarchies under new geopolitical arrangements.

Drawing on political economy and international relations scholarship that conceptualizes aid as an instrument of diplomacy, the paper analyzes SSC as a strategic practice embedded in state interests rather than a neutral development intervention. Focusing on African experiences, it explores how governments deploy strategies of multi-alignment to navigate intensifying competition among development partners, leverage bargaining power, and assert greater agency over development agendas. The paper also highlights how these engagements generate new forms of dependency, particularly through debt exposure, extractive investment regimes, and uneven technology transfer.

By juxtaposing the normative claims of SSC with its material outcomes, the paper interrogates the limits of “win-win” cooperation and questions the extent to which SSC alters the underlying power relations that historically shaped Africa’s development trajectories. Rather than treating multipolarity as inherently emancipatory, the paper demonstrates how it expands room for maneuver while deepening structural constraints.

In broader critiques of development as a framework of justice and transformation, the paper argues that the significance of South–South Cooperation lies less in its promise of alternative development and more in its exposure of the enduring tensions between agency, sovereignty, and external influence in Africa’s political economy.