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This article uses Nigeria to explore the interplay of China's economic investments and the media as image-building instruments of Nigerians' perception of China. Thus, the purpose is to investigate whether China's development assistance has shaped the desired outcome—Nigerian public support of China—and to explore the media's role in this process. How effective are China's economic and infrastructural investments as strategies for influencing a positive public image in Nigeria? How can visibility—the amount of media coverage and exposure—of China's investments in Nigeria shape favourable Nigerian public support? Utilising a range of datasets and a longitudinal analysis, I find that Chinese investments may improve Nigeria's economic growth and people's standard of living, but are insufficient to build a positive public image of China. However, China could create a long-lasting favourable public image from its investments if the programmes were supported with effective media representation that made them more visible through the public's news sources. I employed a qualitative research technique and rested the theoretical argument on mediated public diplomacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China features significantly in the Covid-19 narrative for good and bad reasons. The purpose of this paper is to test, empirically, the assumption that Covid-19 would negatively influence perceptions of China in Ghana, due to its perceived relationship with the pandemic. We characterise Chinese manufactured products as soft power resources and analyse the role they play in addressing the personal needs and interests of Ghanaians and how they affect positive and negative perceptions of China amid the Covid-19 pandemic. We used a mixed research method and collected data from a sample size of 1,020 for analysis. We found that Ghanaians are rational actors who maximise the perceived gains of their actions in pursuit of their objectives. Thus, the self-interest and personal satisfaction Ghanaians gain through China's manufactured products outweigh the negative representation of China in the Covid-19 narrative, shaping a positive attitude in Ghana towards China. We situate the argument within rational choice theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since independence in Africa south of the Sahara, deadly internal conflicts have wracked the region more than any other in the world. Some of these conflicts transcended national boundaries because external states became involved in supporting rebel movements. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to an understanding of this international dimension of civil conflict. It develops a framework—unholy alignment, referring to the cooperative relationship between states and rebels—to examine how external support leads to the onset and intensification of civil conflict. I argue that external state support augments rebels' capabilities to intensify violent demands that threaten the target government. I use data from secondary sources through historical process tracing and observation of congruence, and the case studies method, to explore three instances of Rwanda's cooperative relations with rebels between 1994 and 1999, to show how they shaped civil wars in the DRC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]