Dynamics of Economic and Political Relations Between Africa and Foreign Powers

International relations at large and Africa's in particular are shaped by the actors' historical location, by what they offer economically and culturally, and by who they are socially. In international relations nations tend to deal with objective conditions as they are or as they are perceived. However, Lumumba-Kasongo demonstrates through case-studies of Liberia and Zaire/Congo that what the objective conditions are may not necessarily be what they ought to be in the national development process.

The international struggle for power between the West and the East and their supportive brutal and oppressive states in the South, especially in Africa, created the extremely weak conditions that redefined international relations as the tools of domination, rather than the tools of understanding and cooperation. As Lumumba-Kasongo clarifies, Africa did not gain economically or developmentally from this struggle. An important work for scholars and researchers of contemporary Africa and international relations in general.

TUKUMBI LUMUMBA-KASONGO is Herbert J. Charles and Florence Charles Faegre Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Department of International Studies at Wells College, Senior Fellow at the Institute for African Development at Cornell University, Visiting Scholar in the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University, and Director of CEPARRED. He has taught throughout Africa and the United States and has published extensively on international relations, social movements, and structural adjustment programs in Africa. He is author of The Rise of Multipartyism and Democracy in the Context of Global Change: The Case of Africa (Praeger 1998).