Short Abstract

This panel contends that African state and non-state actors are actively shaping multipolarity through diplomacy, strategic alignment, regional cooperation and alternative forms of global engagement.

Long Abstract

As geopolitical competition intensifies and the post-Cold War international order fragments, African states and political actors are increasingly confronted with competing powers, shifting alliances, new economic dependencies, and contested global norms. Yet accounts of emerging multipolarity too often cast Africa as an arena of rivalry rather than as an actor shaping its trajectories.

This panel starts from a different premise: Africa is not simply the object of global geopolitical change; it is a site of agency, contestation, and order-making. It asks how African states and societies interpret, negotiate, resist, appropriate, and reshape the emerging international landscape. How are governments navigating relations with China, Russia, the United States, Europe, the Gulf states, India, Turkey, and other emerging powers? What forms of strategic autonomy, multi-alignment, coalition-building, and diplomatic entrepreneurship are emerging? And how do regional organisations, cities, businesses, civil society, and other non-state actors participate in the remaking of international relations?

Bringing together theoretically informed and empirically grounded research, the panel seeks to move beyond binaries of dependency and autonomy, influence and resistance, centre and periphery. It invites contributions that rethink African agency not as a fixed capacity, but as a dynamic practice through which African actors negotiate the terms of global engagement.

In this context, the panel ultimately addresses the following thematic question: what does the emerging multipolar world look like when viewed from Africa and how might Africa look different when understood as one of its makers?

Propose paper