Browsing by Author "Mensah, Chaldeans"
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Item China and Japan in Africa: globalization and new norms of development assistance and cooperation(2015) Mensah, ChaldeansGlobalization has shifted the fortunes of states and established new patterns of political and economic interchange, with attendant challenges to traditional norms of development assistance and cooperation. Two Asian economic winners in the globalization game – Japan and China – are contributing novel paths of dealing with Africa that challenge traditional approaches to development assistance. This is positioning both states to contribute to our understanding of ways to address the development challenges of the continent that shifts from past preoccupations with humanitarianism to development cooperation that is modeled on partnership, African ownership and mutual benefit. This new focus also accords greater input to African leaders in determining their own development requirements, while extending Sino-Japanese rivalry to the African development cooperation space. Both countries have established inter-governmental linkages with Africa through special conference diplomacy with African leaders to discuss the process and content of cooperation – Japan’s Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD), and China’s Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). This paper offers a comparative analysis of China and Japan’s approaches to development assistance and cooperation in Africa, and assesses how their systematic engagement with the continent is challenging the old patterns of development assistance, and highlighting the continent’s slow rise from the margins of globalization.Item China's foray into Africa: ideational underpinnings and geoeconomic interests(2010) Mensah, ChaldeansChina’s new foreign policy stance in Africa is a marked departure from its previous emphasis on purely ideational principles designed to strengthen its standing as a supporter of the Third World. The ideational affinity with Africa has not changed in China’s foreign policy discourse, but the new emphasis is on an aggressive pursuit of its geoeconomic and geopolitical interests on the continent, marked by an acquisitive impulse for Africa’s natural resources and a concerted effort to offer political support to its allies in Africa to secure those resources in an uncertain post bipolar international system. This paper explores the transformation of China’s African policy, ideationally, from the Bandung principles to the Beijing Consensus, while noting the geoeconomic and geopolitical motivations behind China’s engagement with Africa as it cements its position as an emerging global power. The paper concludes that despite the presumed coincidence of interests and ideational affinity that formed the basis of pre-Deng China-Africa relations, China’s new geoeconomic and geopolitical engagement represents a major pathway for the continent, but serious steps must be taken to harness the relationship to ensure that it fulfils Africa’s desire to pursue a sustainable development agenda that moves it away from overdependence on commodity exports and marginality in the global economy. A version of this paper was presented in July 2008 at the Second Global Studies Conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia.Item Countertrade in third world mutual trade: some notes(1989) Mensah, ChaldeansSouth-South trade has increasingly taken the form of countertrade, a phenomenon variously described as representing 'a freeing' of trade among Third World countries, 'an aberrant feature of the multilateral trading system' and 'a means of maintaining South-South trade which might otherwise not take place'. The paradox inherent in countertrade is clear. Its alleged aberrancy derives from the fact that it entails many of the restrictive and discriminatory practices associated with the bilaterism of the pre-1939 era and also in the fact that in some instances it allows participants to provide each other preferential terms such as subsidies or discounts which can be kept secret from other partners, but at the same time it represents one of the strictest forms of reciprocity - a principle at the heart of the global trading framework.Item Sustaining multilateralism, cross-cultural learning and domestic cooperative internationalism(2017) Mensah, ChaldeansThis paper reports on the NMUN Japan experience from a North American perspective by examining the dynamics of experiential learning, cross-cultural interactions among delegates and with the local culture, an how the conference used widespread media coverage in an effort to build new constituencies in Japan for multilateralism and cooperative internationalism, defined as “an orientation toward international affairs that stresses concern for others abroad with whom one should work toward common goals.”