African Foreign Policies Selecting Signifiers to Explain Agency

• Main Author: Bischoff, Paul-Henri
• Format: eBook
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Routledge 2020; Taylor and Francis; Taylor & Francis Group
• Edition: 1
• Series: Routledge Studies in African Politics and International Relations
• Subjects: Africa-Foreign relations-1960; Africa-Politics and government-1960; African foreign policies; African Politics; African Studies; Botswana; continentally based ontologies; Diplomatic relations; Ethiopia; Foreign Policy; International Relations; Malawi; Nigeria; South Africa; the African experience; Tunisia; Ahmed Salem; Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church; Socio-economic Development; SADC Treaty; Middle Eastern Arab Countries; Foreign Policy Behaviour; Foreign Policy Agency; Humanitarian Aid; Strategic Culture Approach; Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma; African Agency; Bingu Wa Mutharika; SADC Tribunal; President Bingu Wa Mutharika; Collective Foreign Policy; SADCC; National Role Conceptions; South Africa's Foreign Policy; Ethiopia's Foreign Policy; Actor-centric Perspective; Foreign Policy; Foreign Policy Analysis; SADC Secretariat; Nigeria's Foreign Policy; SADC Summit
• ISBN: 0367348284; 9780367348281; 1032400269; 9781032400266
• DOI: 10.4324/9780429328237

This book explores, at a time when several powers have become serious players on the continent, aspects of African agency, past and present, by African writers on foreign policy, representative of geography, language and state size. In the past, African foreign policy has largely been considered within the context of reactions to the international or global "external factor". This ground-breaking book, however, looks at how foreign policy has been crafted and used in response not just to external, but also, mainly, domestic imperatives or (theoretical) signifiers. As such, it narrates individual and changing foreign policy orientations over time-and as far back as independence-with mainly African-based scholars who present their own constructs of what is a useful theoretical narrative regarding foreign policy on the continent-how theory is adapted to local circumstance or substituted for continentally based ontologies. The book therefore contends that the African experience carries valuable import for expanding general understandings of foreign policy in general. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of Foreign Policy Analysis, Foreign Policy Studies, African International Relations/Politics/Studies, Diplomacy and more broadly to International Relations.