Engagement with Africa: Making Sense of Turkey’s Approach in the Context of Growing East-West Rivalry

Abstract:

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 urkey 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.