AFRICAN, ASIAN, AMERICAN AND CENTRAL EUROPEAN VIEWS ABOUT
THE CHANGING WORLD ORDER AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
April 29, Wednesday
| Keynote lecture / Ian Taylor Memorial Lecture: Dr. Lina Benabdallah (USA), Between Solidarity and Geopolitical Rivalries: Making Sense of Africa–China Relations in a Shifting Global Order |
Lina Benabdallah is McCulloch Family Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Wake Forest University. She is the author of Shaping the Future of Power: Knowledge Production and Network-Building in China-Africa Relations (University of Michigan Press, 2020). Her research has appeared in International Studies Quarterly, International Studies Reviews, African Affairs, The Journal of International Relations and Development, Third World Quarterly, Ethics and International Affairs among others. In 2022, Dr. Benabdallah joined the team of editors of PS: Political Science and Politics as co-editor. In the 2025–2026 academic year, she is a visiting fellow at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center.
In this moment of Global Order transition that we are witnessing, strategic narratives are ever more crucial to foreign policymaking. In this paper, I examine South-South Cooperation narratives with a focus on Africa-China relations. At a time when we are witnessing the increasing retreat of traditional powers from the international development scene and the emergence of even more players from within the Global South as serious partners in development, narratives of South-South cooperation are even more at the center of politics. However, parallel to these hyped narratives of solidarity are realities on the ground with countries such as China, India, and Brazil, and South Africa battling to keep their domestic economies afloat amidst global tariffs, trade barriers imposed by the US, and renewed scramble for energy sources. As the Late Professor Ian Taylor astutely questioned about a decade ago, in the middle of these seeming changes, are African states truly increasing their agency or merely diversifying their dependence.
In this talk I, inspired by Professor Taylor’s work, I dig deeper into reflections about whether in today’s geopolitical moment South-South cooperation is truly a path of alterity for Global South states or is it indelibly caught in extractive and exploitative competition over resources and markets?