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British reactions to China's increasing engagement with Africa in recent years have been manifested in particularly negative and reductive ways tending to depict China's presence in Africa as destructive and self-serving, in contrast to Britain's more enlightened, supportive approach. However, more recently official discourse has begun to stress the shared outlook between British and Chinese objectives, emphasising Chinese moves towards a more constructive, development-focused approach in Africa. This article discusses the ways in which China in Africa is viewed in British political circles and assesses the degree to which such views resonate with the British sense of its own idealised identity. It suggests that the two narratives represent two sides of a dual ‘liberal’ approach to the problem of ‘non-liberal’ actors in international politics: first the tendency to reject and see them as outside the international order; and second the attempt to rehabilitate them and bring them within it. The article concludes by exploring a number of reasons for the particular ways in which Britain, China and Africa are configured, arguing that this dual conception represents a sense of ambiguity about the potential universality of liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars debate whether Eurocentric theories of International Relations (IR) offer useful explanations of African international politics. They also debate the applicability of Eurocentric theories of state making for understanding African state making in the post-colonial era. I argue that theories like realism and war-and-state-making appear inconsistent with African political reality because when IR scholars apply these theories to Africa, they study the wrong actors. The ‘right’ actors for understanding these theories include not only the official states IR scholars traditionally analyse, but also all of the autonomous political entities that control territory, possess military resources, and struggle to survive under anarchy. I substantiate my claims about the usefulness and necessity of expanding the roster of actors studied with an historical narrative of the first six years of Congo's independence. During this time six autonomous political entities, in addition to the one official state, warred with each other, allied with each other, and struggled to make states. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the challenges faced by Beijing in managing this increasingly complex relationship, reflecting upon the structural factors that encourage harmony and introduce discord in China- Africa ties. It examines how various policy solutions being considered by China, ranging from increasing participants in the policy-making process to tentative engagement with international development regimes, may still not address the most difficult issues involving adverse reactions to the Chinese presence from African civil societies and political opposition groups. In particular the lack of a strong civil society inside China inhibits the ability of its policy makers to draw on the expertise of the kind of independent pressure groups and NGOs that are available to traditional donor/ investor states. The article concludes by asking how the Chinese system can make up for these weaknesses without moving further towards the existing models and practices of the developed countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an attempt to use some of the quantitative techniques of political science to provide a factual description of the voting behaviour of the African members in a selected session of the United Nations General Assembly. Drawing primarily upon methodology that has been used in studies of the United States Congress, 67 roll-call votes of the eighteenth session have been used to answer three questions which would seem primary to this description: (i) On what types of issues are the African states united and on what are they divided? (2) On divisive issues, into what groups are they divided? (3) How do the groupings vote, combine, and divide on these divisive issues? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Organisation of African Unity is now three years old. In view of the nature of both its scope and its goals, it would obviously be premature to attempt an evaluation of this organisation at such an early stage. On the other hand, the O.A.U. has grown precociously since its birth in May 1963, and the time is ripe for a description of its rapidly multiplying organs, and for some preliminary observations of the multifarious activity in which they have been engaged. To state that the O.A.U. is still in the cradle stage of its development is to emphasise the obvious. It is hardly surprising also that it should suffer the pains of growth, which are likely to be rather severe in the case of a scheme so ambitiously conceived. These facts must be kept in mind while reviewing the O.A.U. at its present state of development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]