Abstract
In Africa's Global Infrastructures, editors Jana Hönke, Eric Cezne, and Yifan Yang successfully bring together a diverse group of scholars to examine how large-scale infrastructure projects – planned, financed, and implemented by the “big players” of the Global South, particularly China, Brazil, and India – shape political relations, power dynamics, and everyday life across Africa. The volume is organized into three thematic sections: (1) Beyond Models, (2) Contestations, and (3) Everyday Entanglements. Collectively, these sections demonstrate how infrastructure projects in Africa serve as negotiation sites where global and local actors shape, challenge, and redefine the meaning of development and power.
The central argument of the volume is that infrastructure should not be seen merely as a technical or developmental undertaking, but rather as a phenomenon that reflects the power dynamics, contestations, and the daily interactions of actors involved at all levels within state bureaucracies, foreign companies and their staff, local employees, and “grassroots” activists (pp. 3–4). In this regard, the introduction presents the editors’ motivation to scrutinize the concept of “globalities,” referring to various localized ways of daily interactions while negotiating and reshaping global processes, as revealed in large-scale infrastructure projects undertaken by the Southern actors in Africa. This framing underscores that global processes are not uniform but are constantly reshaped through the negotiations and frictions between host governments, foreign corporations, local and foreign workforces, and civil society organizations (CSOs).
To strengthen its stance, the volume introduces the concept of “frontier zones” as a scaled-down version for project sites to highlight bottom-up relations between local workers and communities and the managerial and technical staff dispatched by Global South investors. This, in turn, reveals the “entanglements” that highlight the power dynamics and the interactions between these groups. One of the most significant contributions of the volume lies in showing how African actors – long accustomed to “Eurocentric knowledge” (p. 3) – engage with and contest Southern-led projects, thereby reshaping the fundamental definition of global connectivity. These conceptual tools, mostly leaning on a grounded empirical approach, allow the volume to move beyond a focus on state-to-state relations and shed light on the relational interplay of actors across multiple levels, offering a more nuanced understanding of power and agency. It is important to note that the editors choose to employ qualitative data collected through ethnographic observations, interviews, and narrative case studies, as well as research projects together with media reports and CSO publications, in order to explain this relationality.
Beyond Models (Chapters 2 and 3)
This section challenges common assumptions of unified models and trajectories of the Global South towards Africa, particularly regarding strategies of China, Brazil, and India. In Chapter 2, Raoul Bunskoek suggests that while China is often seen as centralized and hierarchical, its engagement in Africa is highly decentralized, shaped by local autonomy and “thin relationality” (p. 44), marked by adaptability and reciprocity. He emphasizes the “enabling” and “empowering” functions of the competitive Chinese state funding mechanism while also showing how “relationality” plays out both at FOCAC meetings and also through project-level interactions on the ground with the African agencies to constantly adapt their policies and practices. To strengthen his argument, he refers to Chinese investments in projects in Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Kenya, many of which went forward following the adaptation of the Chinese to the local development policies, thereby stressing that China, in fact, uses a model with no model (p. 40).
In Chapter 3, Barnaby J. Dye, Mathias Alencastro, and Ricardo S. de Oliveira contrast Brazil's state-led big international companies financed by the BNDES (Brazilian Development Bank) model with India's decentralized, private-sector-led strategy supported by concessional schemes like IDEAS (India Development Economic Assistance Scheme). The authors refer to the changing policies of the Brazilian governments in Africa as the governments change while the big internationalized Brazilian companies establish close – and at times corrupt – ties with host governments.
The trilateral comparative analysis offered in this “Beyond Models” section gives an invaluable insight into the engagements of Global South powers, arguing that there is no single model but rather separate trajectories and models through adaptation and experience.
Contestations (Chapters 4, 5, and 6)
The “Contestations” section explores the growing influence of Southern civil society organizations (CSOs) since the 2010s – excluding their Chinese counterparts, whose influence remains limited. These chapters demonstrate how cooperation is frequently characterized by friction, as governments, corporations, CSOs, and African communities negotiate and contest the challenges arising in large-scale infrastructure projects.
As an example, Jan Sändig and Jana Hönke examine, in Chapter 5, Chinese-run cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo's Katanga province, highlighting how local activists appeal to Northern CSOs through what they call the “boomerang model” (p. 104) to pressure companies and home governments over environmental and social damages. Drawing on political opportunity theory, they argue that access to “political institutions, available allies, and repression” shapes activism (p. 108). The case shows Congolese CSOs struggling to mobilize international support while operating under an authoritarian regime and China focusing more on maintaining its global image rather than addressing real needs and demands on the ground.
Together with Chapters 4 and 6, by Laura Trajber Waisbich and Benard Musembi Kilaka, respectively, which critically interrogate South–South cooperation and local resistance to large-scale projects, this section offers valuable empirical insight while revealing gaps, particularly the lack of broader data on African CSO-led outcomes such as project cancellations or mitigation efforts.
Everyday Entanglements (Chapters 7 and 8)
The “Everyday Entanglements” section addresses the regional effects of South–South development and infrastructure initiatives, emphasizing the ways in which labor hierarchies, spatial disparities, and lack of community involvement influence the responses of the African agencies.
In Chapter 7, by means of detailed process tracking and making extensive use of fieldwork, Elisa Gambino and Mandira Bangwandeen introduce the concepts of “living at work,” reflecting spatial and social inequality, and “ethnotechnical hierarchy” (p. 159), referring to the stratified roles between Chinese staff and African locals in low-skilled jobs in project sites. Drawing on Massey's “theory of place” (p. 161), the authors show how language barriers, brokers, and isolated Chinese compounds shape interaction while also turning them into arenas of both cross-cultural socialization and power negotiation. This stands as a major strength of the volume with its focus on bottom-up relations between African agencies and Southern actors, which is often overlooked in the literature.
Chapter 8 by Michael Godet Sambo and Phyllis Bußler furthers this perspective by highlighting the role of African agency through a comparative case study of two agricultural projects in Mozambique: ProSAVANA (African Savannah Agricultural Development Project), a Brazilian, Japanese, and Mozambican initiative in CSO-active Nampula province, and WANBAO (WANBAO Africa Agriculture Development Limited), a private Chinese-funded project in government-aligned Gaza. Through these cases, the authors demonstrate how different local CSOs’ strengths and political contexts lead to divergent project outcomes. They also illustrated how local actors have been gaining more clout to participate in development processes.
Final Reflections
Large-scale infrastructure projects are often treated as static, technical undertakings that support host countries’ progressive development. In the African context, these projects are frequently linked to macro-level narratives involving concessional financing, resource-for-infrastructure deals, debt-trap diplomacy, conditionality-free engagement, elite entrenchment, and concerns over transparency and accountability. However, Africa's Global Infrastructures challenges these top-down assumptions. Through its intensive use of interviews and stories, the volume convincingly illustrates that infrastructure is a dynamic site of negotiation, contestation, and adaptation by multiple actors with competing interests and unequal power, embedded in local and global entanglements.
The book is a timely and significant contribution to the literature on infrastructure politics and development in Africa, and it is highly recommended for scholars and practitioners seeking to understand the political life of infrastructure beyond its technical dimensions.
