Africa and the North offers a concise, empirically rich and clearly written overview of some of the key aspects of Northern involvement with the continent. The editors have done very well to hold each chapter author to a single remit, giving the book a coherence that some edited volumes fail to achieve. It would be very useful for any student of Africa's international politics.

Clapham provides a general overview of the history of Africa's international relations. He emphasises the problematic nature of African sovereignties, born from a decolonisation that took place during Cold War bipolarity, and subsequently weathering a range of hostile forces, most notably economic collapse or decline. African states have had to engage with powerful external forces such as economic conditionality, aid agendas, and security concerns related to international terrorism. This chapter sets a context for what follows.

Médard reviews what he calls Françafrique – a politics akin to what Bayart called the mutual assimilation of elites. Like others, Médard emphasises the exceptionally close relations between the elites of Paris and the various capital cities of francophone Africa. This close relationship has been constructed through a French political culture of mission civilisatrice and some more material concerns. In this respect, France has distinguished itself as the most militarily involved of the ex-colonial powers. On the whole Médard is struck by the continuities in French–African relations, although he notes the less assured relations that have emerged since the devaluation of the French African franc in 1994.

Cumming's chapter on Anglo-African relations also highlights continuity – less in an enduring ideological vision of national grandeur, and more in the pragmatic pluralism of British governance. He organises his narrative mainly through a contrast between the Conservatives (1979–97) and New Labour. The focus on Thatcher and Major seems a little dated. He entertains the possibility that there might be a New Labour ‘third way’ in Anglo-African relations, but is cautious regarding its extent.

Rothschild and Emmanuel describe American relations with Africa, setting a series of stages from limited engagement to the contemporary security and fossil fuel agendas. There is a sense that America is acting extremely cautiously in Africa, largely because it perceives intervention in the continent as unpredictable and problematic.

There are also chapters on Japan and Germany that discuss the phasing and policy making behind Japan's largely economic interests and Germany's bureaucratic values. All of the chapters are very clearly written and competently executed. As Engel and Rye Olsen state in their introductory chapter, the first purpose of each chapter is to describe in some empirical detail the nature of Northern–African relations. But, although each author develops thematics to organise their work, these thematics are not so theoretically interesting. This is noteworthy because the editors foreground early in the introduction the paucity of Africa's ‘presence’ in International Relations literature. Generally, the book offers clear and concise accounts of the practice of international relations as practice (diplomatic, military, aid, trade, economic policy), but very little on Africa's International Relations as theory – that is, what ‘Northern’–African interactions tell us more analytically or systemically about ‘the international’, Africa's place in it, or the generic or essential nature of Northern involvement.

Chapters on the European Union and United Nations offer partial exceptions. Here – perhaps because of their intergovernmental provenance – authors think more explicitly and reflectively about the patterning of international power. Rye Olsen argues that the EU has been driven by a desire to establish a European identity at the international level, and that this has, for self-evident historical reasons, strongly interpolated EU–Africa relations. Nevertheless, changing global orders and emerging bureaucratic politics within Europe have calibrated any strong European formulation of development cooperation. Regarding the United Nations, Rye Olsen argues that it is best understood as an institutional expression of a more general lack of interest in Africa held by Northern states. The UN has been endowed with a multilateral mandate which it is inadequately funded and institutionally stretched to perform.

The book is a great overview of a specific set of bilateral relations between Africa and different Northern states and intergovernmental organisations. The approach is to start with each state/organisation and explore its relations with Africa as a whole, so one gets a sense of ‘outside looking in’ concerning African agencies in international politics. The book – through no fault of its own – reads as a little dated because of the reinvigoration of aid politics that has taken place from about 2005 onwards (the year of publication, but some of the chapters seem to have been written a couple of years earlier). It is perhaps unfair to make too strong a criticism of what the book doesn't do, but I would have been interested in reading something on Scandinavian states, which developed substantial and relatively ‘non aligned’ Africa policies from the late 1960s onwards. Japan is included as ‘Northern’, which begs the question is the status of China as a candidate for consideration. The recognition (in academic circles anyway) of China as a significant actor in Africa's international politics commences shortly after the book's publication, so again this might just be unfortunate timing, except that it raises questions about what ‘the North’ actually is.