Is a 'digital cold war' turning Africa, yet again, into a geopolitical battleground for great powers? It is said that African countries now risk becoming incorporated into different 'technological spheres of influence' as US-China rivalry increasingly revolves around digital technology. It is believed that China has the upper hand in this struggle given its structural power in African Information and Communications Technology (ICT) networks. Yet we question this understanding. Rather than Manichaean cold war antagonism and bifurcated technology domains, Africa's digital development is primarily taking place within the context of the uniformity of global capitalism. China is not dominating African ICT networks; instead, the technology stack displays multiplicity, and many governments wish to diversify their ICT suppliers as they make choices around digital investments on pragmatic and non-geopolitical grounds. We observe how multiple stakeholders - public and private actors, global and local firms, both beyond and inclusive of Chinese entities - compete and collaborate across scales for profit and for the digital transformation of African societies. We illustrate our argument of 'capitalist multiplicity' by investigating two cases - Nigeria and Ethiopia.

Ethiopia aspired to become Africa’s “light manufacturing hub” and a “lower middle-income country” by 2025 (National Planning Commission 2016, 143, 169). Successive Ethiopian governments launched long-term plans and pursued industrial policies in line with a declared “developmental state” approach inspired by Japanese, South Korean, and Chinese models (Aberg and Becker 2020; Cheru and Oqubay 2019; Clapham 2018; Fourie 2015; Gebreeyesus 2013; Oqubay 2018). The intention was to build on the country’s comparative advantages of cheap land and labor to develop manufacturing with backward linkages to the domestic economy, focus on labor-intensive light manufacturing, build special economic zones (SEZs) to attract foreign direct investment (FDI), and promote exports for global markets to create jobs, enhance skills, expand the private sector, and kickstart wider industrialization.

This chapter shows the value of international relations (IR) theory in analysing the intensifying digital competition between the United States and China on the African continent. This chapter advocates for a pluralistic approach that draws on realism, constructivism, world-systems analysis, and postcolonialism. Each theoretical lens offers a distinct analytical perspective, revealing different dimensions of the geopolitical, economic, and normative dynamics at play. Rather than privileging a single framework, this chapter emphasizes the pedagogical and analytical utility of theoretical diversity in understanding complex global phenomena. This chapter specifically demonstrates how theoretical pluralism enhances our grasp of the digital competition between the United States and China on the African continent and invites readers to critically assess the usefulness of each perspective.

In this essay I reflect on the problem of authority in the doctoral supervision process. I define the supervisor-student relationship in terms of virtue, rather than power. I further argue for a hierarchical teacher-student relationship as it leads to unambiguous role expectations. It is the role of the supervisor to prepare, guide and teach the doctoral student how to take on the academic world and become a good scientist. This is best done by a hierarchical teacher-student relationship, with clear roles and responsibilities, where the student accepts the authority of the supervisor.

I denna essä reflekterar jag över auktoritetsproblematik i doktorandhandledning. Det är handledarens roll att förbereda, vägleda och lära doktoranden hur man tar sig an den akademiska världen och blir en god samhällsvetare. För detta ändamål argumenterar jag för en hierarkisk relation mellan handledare och student eftersom det leder till entydiga rollförväntningar. Jag definierar relationen mellan handledare och student i termer av dygd snarare än makt. Jag reflekterar också över min egen doktorserfarenhet som illustrerar auktoritetsproblematiken.

Recent calls to study international practices stand out for their attempts to bridge the material ideational divide, viewing international relations as a realm of competent acts engendering the international system. Foreign policy, as a bureaucratic enterprise of protocol and institutional practices, is the ideal ground to assess the value of practice in International Relations. But as our case study of sanctions relief in Sudan shows, crossing the levels of analysis is hardly a smooth process as clashes emerge and challenge the status quo requiring departures from existing norms. When descending the levels of analysis into the very weeds of actual diplomatic issues, one finds a range of practices that challenge a singular view of international practices. Success or failure of policy, its direction, and evolution must address the harmony or clash of practices across these levels. This paper assesses the value of practice by studying a case with a clear evolution in practices in the development of sanctions relief in Sudan.

This paper seeks to reconcile performative theorizing, which captures the place of systems of thought on foreign policy practice, and broader sociological approaches that link networks and institutions across space, especially as they relate to the global economy. Once developed, the theory, which is termed here ‘spatial performativity’, is applied to recent efforts to promote industrialization through the development of special economic zones in Ethiopia. In doing so, attention is drawn to a burgeoning area of African and Chinese foreign policy and economic cooperation.

Despite vociferous disagreement by scholars and ambivalence by China over a "China Model" of development, China is still held up as an exemplar of development. Nowhere is this clearer than in the theory of New Structural Economics (NSE) promulgated by the former Chief Economist of the World Bank, Justin Lin. We seek to critically engage Lin's theory apropos of China and China's geopolitical and economic interests in Africa. Lin argues that developing countries can learn from China's development experience, and his theory, NSE, fills this experience with theoretical content. China, though often dismissive of a "China Model," gains a soft power advantage from its association with NSE as an exemplar and from Lin's own role in rationalizing China-Africa economic interests in purely analytical and intellectual terms. In Ethiopia, the regime actively heeded Lin's policy advice and implemented development policies in line with his theoretical model. Justin Lin's "China Model" is not an antagonistic model, but part of mainstream economic theorizing. It does not represent a competing counter-hegemonic model. It is complementary to the global capitalist system. This is the unorthodox orthodoxy of Justin Lin's "China Model."

China's economic success has prompted both academic political economists and applied policy analysts to speculate about the implications of a new 'China model' of economic development and global economic governance. A particular issue is the degree to which the China model involves developing in opposition to or in cooperation with the pre-existing norms of global economic governance. Recognizing the ambiguity of the China model, we consider two alternative interpretations of China's role in global economic governance: China Challenge (CC) and Business as Usual (BaU). We flesh out these contrasting interpretations using evidence from the lending behavior of four major development finance institutions in which China plays a leading or determinative role: the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the New Development Bank (NDB), the Silk Road Fund (SRF), and the China-Africa Development Fund (CADF) of the China Development Bank. We find that (at least in the restricted domain of international development finance) China's role in global economic governance is largely characterized by BaU behavior, and although on a regional level this does represent a challenge to the historical role of Japan, it nonetheless suggests that the China model is not so revolutionary as many analysts suppose.

This introductory article examines the concept of strategic localization, which is central to the theme of this Special Issue ofPolitics & Policy. We focus on how African states, for regime survival and/or pragmatic reasons, reinterpret China's development discourse and preferences and implement them in their local contexts. We hypothesize that the China model of development has become a rhetorical commonplace used to legitimize policies perceived to be: (1) better for regime survival (e.g., no political conditionalities; dissemination of resources to elites); and (2) superior to other development models (more suitable for developing countries, better at developing strong states). The article will also give a synopsis of the other articles in the Special Issue-highlighting their main arguments and findings.

There is a widespread feeling that globalization represents a major system change that has or should have brought world society to the forefront of international relations theory. Nonetheless, world society remains an amorphous and undertheorized concept, and its potential role in shaping the structure of the international society of states has scarcely been raised. We build on Buzan's (2018, 2) master concept of ‘integrated’ world society (‘a label to describe the merger of world and interstate society’) to locate the integration of world society in the globalization of social networks. Following the advice of Buzan (2001) and Williams (2014), we use conceptual frameworks from international political economy to systematically explore the structure of integrated world society along six dimensions derived from Mann (1986) and Strange (1988): military/security, political, economic/production, credit, knowledge, and ideological. Our empirical survey suggests that, on each of these dimensions, power has centralized as it has globalized, generating steep global hierarchies in world society that are similar to those that characterize national societies. The centrality of the United States in the networks of world society makes it in effect the ‘central state’ of a new kind of international society that is endogenized within integrated world society.