Contemporary regional development in AfricaRegionalism and integration in Africa

The African continent currently experiences deep transformations in the spatial organization of power, the distribution of wealth, and loyalties. One aspect of these transformations are the deepening processes of regionalization, that is the intensification of interactions of people, ideas, and goods beyond the confines of hitherto established (imagined or real) borders of social, political and economic life. Not only an increasing number of regional institutions like the African Union (AU) and its Regional Economic Communities (RECs) and their expansive authorities, also development corridors and the spread of cross-border violence are evidence of the multiplicity of contemporary forms and paths of regionalism in Africa. Thus, the three books reviewed here are a very timely testimony to these diverse processes of regionalization, their diverging paths, multiple protagonists and ambiguous outcomes. Together, the books show how regionalism has become an important policy doctrine that promises to foster economic development, create wealth, and build peace. They also demonstrate that the academic study of regionalism has also become a theoretically and conceptually challenging field where, in times that regionalism in Europe seems to be on the demise, experiences and vocabularies from the Global South can serve as vanguard in crafting new concepts and advancing theory.

Demise · Development economics · Economic geography · Economics · Expansive · General partnership · Geography · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Regional Integration · Regionalism (politics) · Sociology · Global Economic and Social Development · International Development and Aid · Law · Leadership, Human Resources, Global Affairs