Introduction

The development history of Africa has been characterised by many twists and turns. Independence in the late 1950s and most of the 1960s was brought about by resistance to colonial sociopolitical and economic relations. For almost 30 years after that, ambitions for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) (a proposal from developing countries to revise the international economic system) was driven by a desire for an autonomous postcolonial development, including in Africa. The debt crisis, by undermining the financial space and tightening the dependence of the developing to the developed world, shattered the unity necessary for the achievement of the NIEO as then conceived (Radice, 2011). Many initiatives and attempts at new alliances were undertaken to try to break what was considered a dependent relationship between the global South and the ‘imperial North’, including the declaration of economic development as a human right – recognition of the links between rights violations, poverty, exclusion, vulnerability, conflict and failure to achieve development in its multidimensional form. If the 1970s saw a debate of what states could actively do to usher development in Africa, the 1980s saw an attempt to roll back the state. In both cases, the reforms were driven by a sense of limited success in delivering effective development – an environment where the population had a sense of acceptable access to services, voice and self-worth (Sen, 1990). Development was increasingly couched in the context of human freedom and the analysis of poverty put in a multidimensional context.

By 2000, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were born as a global compact to deliver this new vision of development. Today, rapid economic growth has arguably spread from Southeast Asia to Latin America, and now Africa. While much of the old capitalist industrialist heartland is mired in economic stagnation and fiscal crisis, some of the ‘emerging economies’ face an investment glut due to increased activities by investors to find new outlets for ‘redundant’ capital (Radice, 2011). Radice (2011) argues that the current trends in the world economy and global politics provide evidence that the global South has now arrived at ‘normal’ capitalism (characterised by heightened conflict between labour and capital), at last bringing with it new patterns of uneven development, inequality and injustice.