Africa’s booming growth dynamics have drawn a renewed interest of its traditional Western trade
partners, who felt their preferential relations threatened by the growing Chinese competition
for access to the abundant strategic resources. The Chinese approach of combining trade in
minerals with investments in large infrastructure projects to access the needed resources has
transformed the traditional structure of the geopolitical rivalry on the continent. With the
objectives of the geostrategic game shifting from territorial domination to political hegemony,
oil and profits, the payoffs to different protagonists have become more complementary than
mutually exclusive. As a result, new foreign actors seeking to use their own specific approaches
to take advantage of the growing African trade and investment opportunities have emerged.
In this article, we analyse the main patterns of global actors’ engagement with Africa, as well as
shed some light on the way how Turkey has gotten involved in the continent. We hope to make
sense of Turkey’s growing diplomatic and trade relationships with Africa in the context of the
increasing competition for influence between Africa’s traditional Western partners and the
emerging Asian global players. One of our goals is to ascertain whether Turkey’s engagement
with Africa is something unique or bears resembles to other actors’ engagement.
Primary Language | English |
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Journal Section | Articles |
Authors | |
Publication Date | June 1, 2014 |
Published in Issue | Year 2014 Volume: 11 Issue: 41 |