Africa’s unique position as an international diplomatic actor has not always been given the attention it deserves. This volume bridges this gap by offering a fresh, comprehensive and realistic overview of African diplomacy. The book examines African diplomatic practice. Chapters explore how different types of diplomacy have developed over time, including energy diplomacy, economic diplomacy and quiet diplomacy. Crucially, the book assesses how certain events have allowed Africa to use certain types of diplomacy to yield better outcomes for itself. Including contributions from an international team of scholars, policy makers and experts from the diplomatic world, the book provides a comprehensive guide to African diplomacy and challenges the current dominant usage of Northern perspectives on diplomacy studies.

African Diplomacy: The UN Experience deals with some of the many issues, affecting Africa, which came before the United Nations in the immediate, post-independence period. Of major importance were the establishment of the Economic Commission for Africa, and the revocation of the Mandate which conferred on South Africa responsibility for the administration of the Trusteeship Territory of South West Africa. The book also deals with some policy issues not strictly within the ambit of the United Nations, but which were of special international significance, such as the interminable controversy regarding Chinese representation in the United Nations (1950-1967), the Commonwealth initiative to end the conflict in Vietnam, and the complexities of multilateral diplomacy. The final chapter “Reflections on Some Contemporary Issues” discusses current issues of topical interest, including the effect of the Cold War on diplomatic practice, globalization, economic development, foreign aid, peacekeeping, and the failure of party politics in Africa. While the episodes dealt with in the book are not all in strict chronological order, they have been arranged to enable the flow of the narrative without departing unduly from the general chronology of the events.

This book probes key issues pertaining to Africa’s relations with global actors. It provides a comprehensive trajectory of Africa’s relations with key bilateral and major multilateral actors, assessing how the Cold War affected the African state systems’ political policies, its economies, and its security. Taken together, the essays in this volume provide a collective understanding of Africa’s drive to improve the capacity of its state of global affairs, and assess whether it is in fact able to do so.

Africa’s unique position as an international diplomatic actor has not always been given the attention it deserves. This volume bridges this gap by offering a fresh, comprehensive and realistic overview of African diplomacy. The book examines African diplomatic practice. Chapters explore how different types of diplomacy have developed over time, including energy diplomacy, economic diplomacy and quiet diplomacy. Crucially, the book assesses how certain events have allowed Africa to use certain types of diplomacy to yield better outcomes for itself. Including contributions from an international team of scholars, policy makers and experts from the diplomatic world, the book provides a comprehensive guide to African diplomacy and challenges the current dominant usage of Northern perspectives on diplomacy studies.

This book examines Africa’s internal and external relations by focusing on three core concepts: orders, diplomacy and borderlands. The contributors examine traditional and non-traditional diplomatic actors, and domestic, regional, continental, and global orders. They argue that African diplomats profoundly shape these orders by situating themselves within in-between-spaces of geographical and functional orders. It is in these borderlands that agency, despite all kinds of constraints, flourishes. Chapters in the book compare domestic orders to regional ones, and then continental African orders to global ones. They deal with a range of functional orders, including development, international trade, human rights, migration, nuclear arms control, peacekeeping, public administration, and territorial change. By focusing on these topics, the volume contributes to a better understanding of African international relations, sharpens analyses of ordering processes in world politics, and adds to our comprehension of how diplomacy shapes orders and vice versa. The studies collected here show a much more nuanced picture of African agency in African and international affairs and suggest that African diplomacy is far more extensive than is often assumed. This book will be of much interest to students of diplomacy studies, African politics and International Relations.

This book is a comprehensive overview of the theory, history, law, institutional framework and culture of global diplomacy. It reflects on the key existential challenges to the institution and addresses aspects that are often overlooked in diplomatic studies: inter alia diplomatic law, development-driven diplomacy and the bureaucracy of diplomatic practice. All chapters are extensively illustrated with recent case examples from across the world. Special emphasis is placed on incorporating perspectives from Africa and other developing regions in the Global South, so as to balance the Eurocentrism of traditional diplomatic literature.