Short Abstract

As geopolitical competition reshapes Africa’s economic landscape, continental actors are seeking to leverage competing external powers for industrial development and structural transformation. This panel examines how these strategies vary across sectors and places, and the tensions they create.

Long Abstract

Recent years have seen the emergence of sustained geopolitical pressure on Africa’s economic structures. Major powers, including the US, China, and the EU, have for instance sought to both secure strategic influence and reshape the geographies of the global economy through competition over trade, infrastructure, and access to strategic resources. These efforts have increasingly shaped the economic opportunities and constraints facing African states and other actors. Concurrently however, scholarship on African agency has challenged accounts that cast continental states and stakeholders as passive recipients of competing external projects, emphasizing instead their capacity to navigate, leverage, and selectively engage multiple partners. Nevertheless, these perspectives have rarely been brought into sustained conversation with scholarship on African industrialization strategies, leaving underexplored the implications of shifting geopolitical dynamics for key processes of structural transformation across the continent.

Responding to this lacuna, this panel aims to examine how African actors are actively attempting to turn geopolitical competition into opportunities for industrial development and structural transformation. This can take a variety of forms, for instance by attracting investment from multiple partners, negotiating infrastructure and technology transfers, positioning within emerging supply chains, or leveraging strategic assets and rival external powers to advance national and regional development agendas. We therefore invite contributions that examine how such strategies vary across sectors and places; explore the tensions and possible contradictions between short-term geopolitical bargaining and longer-term processes of structural transformation; or focus on country-specific cases that shed light on how African actors navigate these changing geopolitical conditions.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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