How Brexit could harm African economies that trade with the UK and disrupt regional integration

The UK must pay urgent attention to the complexities of African trade in order to avoid Brexit having damaging effects, explains Peg Murray-Evans. Failure to do so could mean new barriers to trade from vulnerable African economies and disruption to regional integration

Rising Powers in Complex Regimes : South African Norm Shopping in the Governance of Cross-Border Investment

This article offers a critical engagement with literatures on contemporary global power shifts and the phenomenon of ‘regime complexity’. It does so by focusing on South Africa’s role in the governance of cross-border investment, and using this case to explore the strategies used by rising powers to pursue their strategic aims in institutionally complex and fragmented global governance regimes. The article situates an understanding of regime complexity within a critical constructivist literature that highlights the ambiguity of international norms and the relationship between power and strategic rhetorical action. It argues that complex regimes create space for agency and strategic action by states and highlights one specific strategy – norm shopping – that rising powers can use to legitimate their actions and challenge dominant norms in complex regimes

Ideas and Institutions in the EU-ACP Economic Partnership Agreements: A Study of EU Policy Evolution and the SADC-Minus Negotiations

In the mid 1990s, the European Union (EU) abandoned its legal defence of the Lomé Convention, which had governed EU relations with European former colonies in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (the ACP countries) since 1975. In its place, the EU proposed a series of comprehensive regional free trade agreements – the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) – which went far beyond the requirements of WTO rules in their scope. In this thesis, I aim to add to existing understandings of the EPAs by explaining (a) why the EU sought to recast the EU-ACP relationship in the form of ambitious interregional free trade agreements; and (b) why the EU was able to achieve only limited and uneven success in reaching agreements that matched these aims. In order to address these questions, I develop a theoretical approach that combines insights from constructivist and historical institutionalisms. I aim to contribute to existing constructivist approaches by (a) investigating the emergence of complexity and contradiction within policy outputs over time; and (b) exploring the role of strategic appeals to institutional constraints in persuasive discourse. I use this theoretical approach to draw analytical linkages between the internal processes through which EU external economic projections are formed and their external reach. Specifically, I highlight the emergence of a range of contradictions within the EU’s approach to the EPA negotiations and explore the role of these contradictions in facilitating the contestation of the EPAs by actors from across the ACP regions and particularly from the case study region, SADC-minus. Overall, I argue that the EU’s external economic policy aims and tools are the product of the strategic actions of purposive actors working within the context of path-dependent institutional structures and patterns of past relations with the outside world. In this context, the reach and limitations of EU external economic actions are contingent upon the historical processes through which they are constructed and the understandings, strategies and alternatives that external partners bring to the table

Myths of Commonwealth Betrayal : UK-Africa Trade Before and After Brexit

This article critically interrogates claims that a British exit from the European Union (EU) (Brexit) will create opportunities for the UK to escape the EU’s apparent protectionism and cumbersome internal politics in order to pursue a more liberal and globalist trade agenda based on the Commonwealth. Taking a historical view of UK and EU trade relations with the Commonwealth in Africa, the author highlights the way in which the incorporation of the majority of Commonwealth states into the EU’s preferential trading relationships has reconfigured ties between the UK and its former colonies over time. Further, the author suggests that the EU’s recent attempts to realise a vision for an ambitious set of free trade agreements in Africa—the Economic Partnership Agreements—was disrupted not by EU protectionism or internal politics but rather by African resistance to the EU’s liberal agenda for reciprocal tariff liberalisation and regulatory harmonisation. The UK therefore faces a complex challenge if it is to disentangle its trade relations with Africa from those of the EU and to forge its own set of ambitious free trade agreements with African Commonwealth partners

Regionalism and African agency : negotiating an Economic Partnership Agreement between the European Union and SADC-Minus

This article investigates the regional dynamics of African agency in the case of negotiations for an Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) between the EU and a group of Southern African countries, known as SADC-Minus. I argue that these negotiations were shaped by a pattern of differentiated responses to the choice set on offer under the EPAs by SADC-Minus policymakers and by a series of strategic interactions and power plays between them. I offer two contributions to an emerging literature on the role of African agency in international politics. First, I argue for a clear separation between ontological claims about the structure-agency relationship and empirical questions about the preferences, strategies and influence of African actors. Second, I suggest that in order to understand the regional dynamics of African agency it is important to pay close attention to the diversity and contingency of African preferences and to the role of both power politics and rhetorical contestation in regional political processes

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Complex Norm Localization : From Price Competitiveness to Local Production in East African Community Pharmaceutical Policy

This article offers a critical contribution to debates around access to medicines and the global politics of pharmaceutical production in Africa. Specifically, we seek to account for a normative shift within these debates whereby the promotion of local pharmaceutical production in Africa has once again come to be viewed as a central modality for achieving access to health across the continent. While the onset of this normative shift has been highlighted by the global Covid-19 pandemic, in this article we argue that its antecedents can be traced to a more incremental process of global and regional normative change that has been in motion since the late 1990s. To illustrate this, we narrow our empirical focus onto the East African Community and the regional initiatives its members have pursued to promote local pharmaceutical production capacities since 2012. We draw and build upon the literature on norm localization to emphasize how the emergence and distinctiveness of this policy reflected the complex way in which policy actors within the EAC sought to localize and combine separate (and somewhat competing) changing global norms around access to health and industrial policy. The article also points to the tensions and unintended consequences which emerged from this complex process of norm localization and the challenges of implementing this strategy within the institutional landscape of the EAC

Regional Encounters : Explaining the Divergent Responses to the EU's Support for Regional Integration in Africa, the Caribbean and Pacific

In this article, we map and explain the unevenness of African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) responses to the EU’s external promotion of regional integration in the context of the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs). Although the controversies associated with the EPAs are typically attributed to a common set of problems, what remains to be fully explained is why these manifested themselves to a greater or lesser extent in different national and regional contexts. We account for this variance as a product of the degree of congruence between the institutional trajectory of individual regional projects and the model of economic integration prescribed by the EU in its post-Lomé prospectus for the ACP. We describe this congruence as either ‘high’, ‘medium’ or ‘low’ and use this explanatory model to account for variances in ACP responses to the EPAs, which would otherwise provide an untidy fit with accounts preoccupied with the economic determinants of bargaining outcomes

Limits to market power : Strategic discourse and institutional path dependence in the European Union–African, Caribbean and Pacific Economic Partnership Agreements

The following article offers a critical engagement with recent economic constructivist scholarship as a means of understanding the nature of the European Union’s ‘market power’. It does so by focusing on the African, Caribbean and Pacific group of countries, and seeks to explain why — in spite of the European Union’s preponderant market power — the goal of promoting trade liberalisation and regulatory harmonisation through regional Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) ultimately fell short of original ambitions. We highlight the inadequacies of materialist accounts of the European Union’s market power in this case and instead take our cue from the (predominantly) constructivist literature emphasising the role of transnational advocacy coalitions. We argue, however, that the latter do not go far enough in their exploration of the non-material correlates of the European Union’s market power by considering fully its discursive dimension. To address this shortcoming, we draw on Craig Parsons’ distinction between ideational and institutional logics of explanation to understand how the invocation of institutional constraints affects the impact of particular discursive strategies. We argue that, in our specific case, the success or failure of the Economic Partnership Agreements rested not just on the fungibility (or otherwise) of the European Union’s material power or the campaigning of transnational coalitions, but on the congruence between the ideas used by European Union policy actors to justify the Economic Partnership Agreements and the institutional norms associated with the setting in which these ideas were deployed

Failing women and girls during COVID-19: the limits of regional gender norms in Africa

How do we account for the ability or otherwise of regional organisations in the global South to enable equitable and inclusive responses to the COVID-19 pandemic? We answer this question with a focus on Africa and in relation to the rights of women and girls. Drawing on theoretical insights from Feminist Global Health Security and from data on the African Union and other regional organisations in Africa and from NGOs, local activists and medical centres, we show that regional organisations acted quickly to identify the gendered socio-economic and health needs of women and girls and alerted member states to the need to consider gender rights in their policy responses. However, weak gender norms during crisis led to a disconnect between early recognition of the need for policies to protect women and girls and the failure of regional organisations to either lead that response or engineer it in member state governments