The editor’s introduction to this collection of selected reprints concludes by justifying its title: “While in earlier historical periods it may have made sense to regard Africa as a relatively marginal part of the world, those times have gone. In all sorts of ways . . . Africa is going to have effects on the world. There has never been a more interesting time to study its international relations” (13). Tom Young’s compendium is useful but hardly seminal, reflecting the maturation of international relations (IR) on and about the continent, but not advancing it strongly. Its twenty-seven reprints come from the global North. Their perspective is mainly state-centric and formal; there is too little on the transnational and informal/illegal. Most authors are male academics with a few based at research think tanks. Only three chapters derive from the present decade: those of Nikki Slocum-Bradley and Andrew Bradley on the EU-ACP governance partnership, Marcus Power and Giles Mohan on China and Africa, and Jeremy Keenan on Algeria’s intelligence service (the DRS). The book does not contribute to the current debate about whether Africa is “rising” or whether it is “hopeful” rather than “hopeless.”

The collection does present an overview of Africa’s international relations in its first half-decade of formal independence. It presents insights into new states and the great powers, partnerships (Ian Taylor and Rita Abrahamsen as well as Slocum-Bradley and Bradley), globalization, conflicts (especially around the Great Lakes and the Horn), early and later peace-keeping, old and new geopolitics (including Daniel Volman’s “The Scramble for African Oil and the Militarization of the Continent” on AFRICOM and antiterrorism assistance), and the article by Keenan on the “War on Terror.” Highlights include Michael Jennings’s critique of Oxfam’s role in Nyerere’s Tanzania, which asserts that Oxfam “was blinded to the reality of Ujamaa and Tanzanian development as a result of the politicisation of poverty it held as central to its charitable mission” (78); Abdulmumini Oba on the question of female genital mutilation (FGM) as an issue of “human rights or cultural imperialism”; and Thomas Kwasi Tieku on the creation of the African Union.

But the volume’s state-centric assumptions mean that it ignores historical and contemporary “transnational” relations, from migrations and diasporas to “‘non-traditional security” (NTS) such as Boko-Haram and Al-Shabab. It is largely silent on the BRICS, especially Brazil and South Africa, and overlooks the digital revolution on the continent, from cell phones to mobile finance. It mentions the U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) but not its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and overlooks climate change and the emerging “water-energy-food” nexus.

Nevertheless, Africa (or “Africas,” to reflect the continent’s incredible diversity) is beginning to make a contribution to the burgeoning analytic and applied worlds of “global IR”: the belated recognition that there are myriad interstate and transnational relations outside the North Atlantic and North Pacific, especially (East) Asia and Latin America, even as the Third World fragments into developmental versus fragile or failed states. Reflecting and advancing both African and Global South developments, the International Political Economy Series from Palgrave Macmillan will publish two collections in 2017: van der Merwe, Taylor, and Arkangelskaya, eds., Emerging Powers in Africa: A New Wave in the Relationship? ; and Bergamaschi, Moore, and Tickner, eds., South–South Cooperation Beyond the Myths: A Critical Analysis of Discourses, Practices and Effects. (Full disclosure: I am the general editor of the series.) The field has also been strengthened by Ian Taylor’s The International Relations of Sub-Saharan Africa (Continuum, 2010) and several edited volumes: Tim Murithi’s Handbook of Africa’s International Relations (Routledge, 2013), James Hentz’s Routledge Handbook of African Security (2014), and Paul-Henri Bischoff, Kwesi Anang, and Amitav Acharya’s Africa in Global International Relations: Emerging Approaches to Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2016). The volume under review here falls, then, into increasingly extensive and impressive company.