Dr Edson Ziso1
1The University of Adelaide, Australia
Biography:
Edson ZISO teaches in the Department of Politics & International Studies, University of Adelaide, South Australia where he is also Visiting Research Fellow. He researches on governance in Africa, foreign policy, migration, race and race relations, decoloniality, environmental politics, South-South and North-South relations, Non-Western International Relations, political economy of development and international public policy and Australia's Foreign Policy in the Indo-Pacific. Ziso has a special interest in the political economy of China-Africa relations.
Abstract:
Africa-focused researchers and analysts have been discussing the second ‘Scramble for Africa’ for over two decades now (Lee, 2006; Carmody, 2017; Ewalefoh, 2022; Mlambo et al, 2024). This scramble is not necessarily new as it has been an ongoing phenomenon, however, the intensity of the present scramble has increased multifold (Ewalefoh, 2022). This has raised questions whether Africa will suffer the same devastating fate akin to the first scramble or that this time around, the continent will deploy its new-found agency to turn a scramble for it into an advantage. Despite increasing scholarly attention on African agency, however, there is a paucity of analysis of its value in the current scramble. Yet there is so much to learn about the implications of African agency in the state’s hands. This paper critically evaluates African state agency as a squandered opportunity by examining how the African state has used or misused its agency in the face of some of the continent’s key development issues. The urgent question for Africa ultimately, therefore, may not be whether it requires (more) agency, but whether African states are capable of utilizing it in meaningful and transformative ways.