Reconfiguring Transregionalisation in the Global South

African-Asian Encounters

Ross Anthony, Uta Ruppert, Ross Anthony, Uta Ruppert

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030283100
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030283117
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume examines the Africa-Asia relationship from a transregional perspective, namely as a set of emergent social, political and economic practices spanning a number of analytical and spatial scales. Drawing on a host of countries from both regions, the contributions illustrate how encounters increasingly transcend fixed territorial categories at local, national and regional levels. While large-scale political and economic considerations tend to dominate in Asia-Africa related literature—for instance, in China-Africa, BRICS and South-South discourses—the current volume seeks to foster dialogue between these broader levels of analyses and more localized social practices and experiences, including the role of civil society, cultural production and migration. With an emphasis on the "trans" aspects of inter-regional exchange, the volume contributes to a better understanding of new forms of space-making between these two increasingly important regions.  

© The Author(s) 2020

R. Anthony, U. Ruppert (eds.)Reconfiguring Transregionalisation in the Global SouthInternational Political Economy Serieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28311-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Rethinking African-Asian Encounters in Terms of Transregionalisation: An Introduction

Ross Anthony¹ and Uta Ruppert²

(1)

Department of Modern Foreign Languages, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa

(2)

Faculty of Social Sciences, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany

Ross Anthony (Corresponding author)

Uta Ruppert

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

ScaleSpaceSouth–SouthTerritoryTransregionalisation

End Abstract

Within recent decades, the rapidly growing economic, political and cultural interactions between Africa and Asia have been dominated by the China–Africa relationship. While remarkable in its scope and speed of growth, research in this field has eclipsed broader processes of transnationalisation and transregionalisation with additional Asian actors, including India, Japan, Korea and others. Within this broader context, such interactions increasingly require analysis and conceptualisation from a transregional perspective, not only because they are interwoven with all underlying processes of economic globalisation, but also because they unleash numerous emergent cultural, social and aesthetic interfaces at the regional level. On the one hand, the political economies of both Asia and Africa represent an important force behind the ongoing dynamics that have become increasingly embedded within the global market economy (see Taylor; Bodomo and Che; Anthony in this volume). On the other hand, this convergence has been tempered by a broad range of transregional dynamics at various levels and scales of interaction, including travelling ideas of development (see Adem; Agbakoba in this volume), civil society collaboration (see Mageza-Barthel and Ruppert in this volume), peoples’ mobility (see Diarwara; Park in this volume) and cultural imaginaries (see Samuelson; Schulze-Engler in this volume). These ongoing processes involve a variety of actors, engaging in a diversity of relations, which complicate simple state-to-state and region-to-region relations. Consequently, the main focus of the current volume is to re-examine Africa–Asia relationships from the perspective of transregionalisations within the context of the Global South.

Transregionalisation, in the sense we use the term in the context of this book, is informed by, but simultaneously distinct from, notions of inter-and transregionalism, which have been increasingly discussed within in International Relations and Area Studies since the beginning of the millennium. While such disciplines tend to understand regionalisms mainly “as an instance of international institution building at the regional level” (Börzel and Risse 2016: 621), we view institutional and governance-related perspectives as only one dimension of transregional relations. Instead, our approach resonates closely with concepts of regionalism found in critical International Political Economy, insofar as they are less institution-focussed and more process-oriented—that is to say, regionalisms are viewed as horizontal inter-local alliances (see Jessop 2003, 2016). The privileging of process-orientation over political outcomes accounts for why we emphasise transregionalisation rather than transregionalism. Like the term, “globalisation” itself, transregionalisation thus emphasises the dynamism of emergent processes. Furthermore, in looking beyond formal institutional relations, the volume is interested in marginal interactions and perspectives, including the experiences of petty traders, inter-regional literary associations and even at the level of personal biography (see Diwara, Schulze-Engler and Yoon respectively, in this volume). To our understanding, such examples, and others like them, are key to “trans”-regionalisation(s) in the sense of processes that transcend not only the geographical borders of existing regions and regionalisation(s) but inform the “trans”-formation of limitations of pre-determined regional practices and notions. In this vein, recent discussions of incomplete concepts such as “civil society regionalism” (Söderbaum 2016) which highlight the multi-layered, heterogeneous and paradoxical character of interactions (ibid.: 144ff.), resonate with our view on South–South transregionalisation (see Fanta et al. 2013). We apply such an approach not only to collective social actors but also towards people-to-people interaction and everyday life experiences.

This approach to transregionalisation draws on a growing body of work which exists across several disciplines. In addition to International Relations, some of the most important work stems from research within Area Studies and Human Geography, which, in the past two decades, has examined economic, political and cultural spaces as “trans-regional”, i.e. between and across regions (for example Dent 2003). The work went beyond an analysis of institutions and organisations, with communities and even individuals taken into account as “constituent agents” (ibid.: 231). With the subsequent rise of cultural studies and the spatial turn in the social sciences, which were integrated into certain branches of Area Studies, the discussion on “socio-spatial” relations as hierarchical and power (re)producing relations increasingly focussed on the economy, politics, culture and society at the micro level. This led to an understanding of space making as a result of diverse deliberations of transnational and transregional developments (Middell 2018) which brought into focus relations between political and economic actors, but also relations between people and objects (Bachmann 2016).

While we acknowledge the analytical need for transregional studies to maintain, in part, a “conventional” Area Studies focus on territory-bounded processes, this book directs much attention towards the “trans” instants within, between, and beyond the geographical regions of interest. In this vein, one of the most important aspects of transregionalisation lies in the fact that various units of analysis, be they at the community, nation state or even continental level, can never be fully comprehended without paying attention to influences beyond these parameters. Many research agendas already take this into account, including global history (Bayly 2004; Bulliet et al. 2014; Conrad 2017), colonial history (Hanson and Jonsson 2015; Mignolo 2012), critical Cold War history (Brazinsky 2017; Chamberlin 2018) and environmental studies (Latour 2017; Moore 2015). Such approaches have done much to dismantle stilted and essentialist spatial categories, insofar as they focus on the emergent properties of flows between places—cultural, ecological, economic, political and so forth—as opposed to a priori designations, of which the nation state is the most common. Approaching the issue from the position of a circulatory logic influences the way in which we conceptualise pre-conceived identities themselves. Take, for example, the Swahili coast of East Africa. For centuries, trade and politics linked the region with India and Arabia as intimately as with the African interior. The rise of national identities has subordinated these alternative identities to a certain extent, while at the same time, they persist in a number of ways, not least in the form of ongoing resistance to the nation states of which they are part. Thus, the transregional approach insists on taking not only the nation state narrative into account, but also the way it contends with other levels and dimensions of the political, especially with more fluid forms of identity which have existed historically and continue to exist in the present. From a conceptual perspective then, nationalism of the “blood and soil” type contends and overlaps with a number of other identities which are as much “outside” as they are “inside”.

Within the African context, historically, the most significant dimension of inter-and transregionalism in the above noted sense, has been Europe, and more recently the United States—hardly surprising, given the former’s colonial legacy and the latter’s global hegemony. While there has always been a marginal academic interest in Asia–Africa transregionalism, it has been the “China Rising” narrative (see Bodomo and Che in this volume) over the past three decades which has brought the question of African-Asian transregionalism to the fore, not only within academia, but also within media and policy-making circles. At the same time, certain strains of the “China-Africa” discourse, rather than opening into a broader discussion on Africa–Asia connectivity, revert to the very rigidity of fixed space and identity which transregionalism aspires to transcend. This is in part because a significant component of the discourse is driven by state interests and heavily influenced by, for example, in the case of China, a narrative of “win-win” development, “harmonious co-operation” and “non-interference” in a world of nation-state equals. Beyond such abstract imaginaries, the relationship has engendered a number of far more messy and unpredictable connections. These include, for instance, Chinese migrants who move from one African state to another, attracted not only by opportunity, but also by regional kin ties, and illicit wildlife trading routes, whose networks include rural African trappers, local politicians, European transit points and Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai buyers. In fact, even in terms of connections closer to official narratives, such as Chinese investments in extractive industries and infrastructure, such deals often involve a multitude of investors, stemming from India, Korea and Japan, Europe, America, the Middle East and Africa itself.

Although a portion of the contributions in this book focus on the China–Africa relationship, they nevertheless correspond with our approach to transregionalisation. All articles refer to multilevel processes and dynamics in and between the regions, and invite and include comparison, contrast, and connection with other strands of the Africa–Asia relationship, represented in more depth through the remaining chapters. Much of the literature on African-Asian relations has focused on the political and economic spheres and the dominance of “hard data”. Though there are growing numbers of scholars who focus on the more sociological, anthropological and even aesthetic elements (Nielsen 2014; Park 2008; Simbao 2016), these different spheres rarely speak to each other. The volume thus includes as wide a range of interdisciplinary perspectives as possible. Because the conceptual approach of “Africa-Asia” is still not fully developed, the book comprises basic research perspectives, as well as more conceptual approaches. Chapter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Rethinking African-Asian Encounters in Terms of Transregionalisation: An Introduction
• Part I. Situating African-Asian Encounters Globally
• Part II. Challenging Asia-Africa Grand Narratives
• Part III. Embedding Transregionalisation
• Back Matter