The Future of the Great Powers in Africa: Towards a Political Economy of Intervention

Abstract

Great-Power rivalry in Africa is among the legacies left by European statesmen who, a century ago in Berlin, carved up the continent and whole nations within it into tidy colonial compartments, several with frontiers still in dispute. Russians and Americans attended that inglorious conference but stayed out of the scramble for territories that followed. It is one of history's ironies that Moscow and Washington emerged, with proxies to help them, as leading contestants in the contemporary struggle for position, presence and power in Africa.