Dr Stephen Hurt

With the Cotonou Agreement due to expire in 2020, formal negotiations towards a new partnership agreement between the EU and African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) states began in September 2018. Based on the acceptance of the EU’s negotiating mandate, the new arrangement will be primarily organised via three specific regional protocols with each of the ACP regions. Meanwhile, the Joint Africa-EU Strategy (JAES) launched in 2007, has seen the African Union (AU) gain increased prominence as an institutional partner of the EU. Given its ambitious pan-African agenda, it adopted an alternative ‘African’ vision for future EU-ACP relations, to the mandate agreed by the ACP states and expressed a willingness to become directly involved in the negotiations. This article contributes an important new case-study to the existing literature on ‘African agency’ in international politics by considering the scope for Africa to exert agency within the post-Cotonou negotiations, given the negotiation of a specific regional compact with Africa. It adopts a structurally embedded view of agency, based on Cox’s understanding of historical structures, as a fit between institutions, ideas and material relations. The central argument is that, in comparison to the negotiation of the Cotonou Agreement two decades ago, there is greater scope for African agency. However, both the ideational and material aspects of Africa’s relationship with the EU, condition the limits to how effective such agency might be. Moreover, tensions at the institutional level between the ACP and AU further undermine the potential for effective African agency.

This article addresses the question of 'the left' in contemporary South Africa in two senses. First, in terms of assessing the health of leftist politics; second, it asks to what extent are the self-identified left, progressive in any meaningful sense. The first half of the article reflects on the current development situation in South Africa. Here it is argued that within most sections of the South African left there is broad agreement on the need to address the triple challenge of unemployment, rising inequality and poverty. The second half of the article identifies three broad sections to the contemporary left in South Africa (the Tripartite Alliance, the left outside of the Alliance and the remnants of the revolutionary socialist left). It argues that the left within the Alliance, despite the launch of the New Growth Path, are failing to implement the sufficiently radical policy changes that are required to address the development challenges identified in the first half of the article. The left outside of the Alliance, meanwhile, despite recent attempts at co-ordination, lacks influence and remains disconnected from the masses.

This article considers the response of the largest trade union federation in South Africa, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), to an extended free trade agenda, which has formed a key part of neoliberal restructuring during recent decades. It focuses in particular on South Africa’s position in multilateral trade talks and its negotiation of three Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). COSATU’s critique of these FTAs is considered and in particular the analysis focuses on its attempts at building transnational solidarity with other national labour movements. It argues that despite COSATU’s opposition to trade liberalisation there are a number of obstacles to developing effective international links.

Not only is the participation of developing countries in international trade negotiations growing, so is their influence over the global trade agenda. This article highlights the increasing activism and impact of African states through a detailed study of the current Economic Partnership Agreement (EPAs) negotiations with the European Union (EU). In examining African resistance to EPAs, the article develops a constructivist approach to North-South trade negotiations that pays close attention to the role of development discourses. We argue that the growing willingness of African states to challenge the EU to deliver on its development promises during the decade-long EPA process was crucial to informing their sustained opposition to the EU’s goal of completing a comprehensive set of sub-regional economic agreements. We document African resistance to EU trade diplomacy in the EPAs, exploring how these otherwise weak countries were able to pursue normative-based negotiation strategies by recourse to the EU’s promise of a ‘development partnership.’

This article addresses the consequences of Washington Consensus and more recently post-Washington Consensus policy for democratic good governance in Africa. It acknowledges the increased focus in recent years of policy-makers on poverty as an important force in world politics. Despite this increased concern the authors argue that International Relations as a discipline fails to offer a suitable framework for understanding poverty as a social force. The article proposes a revival of Robert W. Cox and Jeffrey Harrod's approach based on"patterns of social relations of production" . This offers a disaggregation of the condition that is often referred to in the literature as"the poor" or"the informal sector" . The article then outlines a comparative research agenda based on the cases of Tunisia and South Africa. It demonstrates how these cases provide the sternest test for assessing the authors' scepticism of the prospects of reconciling market-led development with good governance, whilst also offering a"most-different" comparison given their very different political cultures. In conclusion, the article reflects on the methodological aspects to operationalising such a research agenda and proposes an ethnographic approach informed by the work of Burawoy.