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Africa's place in international relations is a topic of increasing importance and academic interest. [21] This virtual collection provides a revealing overview of some of the best research on Africa's international relations in recent years, but it also reinforces a number of challenges for the linkages between International Relations and African studies. Yet they share a broad concern with Africa's international relations in one of two key ways, either focusing on the nature of Africa's relations with external actors, or turning to international relationships to explain particular issues or phenomena of significance in Africa. [Extracted from the article]

The reasons for the neglect of the fifth anniversary of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in 2007 are analyzed. It is suggested that the shift in the focus of environmental policies to voluntary, private partnerships, and the lack of expected progress in sustainable development has ruled out the opportunity for acknowledgement or reflection.

Africa has often been defined and represented by outsiders. In International Studies (IS), the continent is frequently viewed as peripheral and uninteresting. This is clearly a problem, and an increasingly apparent one as the number of courses on Africa and IS grow, both in Africa and beyond. Many academics who run these courses are keen to challenge the continent’s traditional marginalisation and perceived dependency; however, they are limited by the resources available to them and the fact that many are establishing new courses from scratch. This article contributes to the literature by identifying key debates around teaching Africa and IS, setting the scene for the articles that follow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resistance, and its study, is on the rise: visible and politically discernible practices of dissent against sovereignty and economic exploitation, such as protesting, agitating and occupying, have received increased analytical attention in the past decade. This special issue provides much needed systematic attention tolessvisible practices of resistance or those not manifested in expressly political registers. It focuses on attempts to inventively modify, resist or escape the ways in which we are governed by interrogating critically the politics and ethics of resistance to “power that conducts”, expressed through Foucault's notion of “counter-conduct”. The contributions first theoretically interrogate, develop and refine the concept of “counter-conduct(s)”, offering a major statement of its importance for both the study of resistance and also its place in Foucault's work. Second, they provide inter/multi-disciplinary empirical investigations of counter-conduct in numerous thematic areas and spaces of global politics. Third, they explicitly reflect on variable and contingent forms of counter-conduct, examining its close relationship with conducting power. Finally, the special issue concertedly considers issues of methodology and method emerging from the study of counter-conduct and how these also recalibrate the study of governing power itself. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The ability of International Relations theory to ‘travel well’ to other parts of the world has become one of the central questions within the discipline. This article argues that a Foucauldian-derived ‘analytics of government’ framework has particular advantages in overcoming some of the difficulties IR theory has faced abroad. These advantages include a methodological focus on specific practices of power at their point of application; attention to similarities between practices of power that cut across perceived binaries such as the domestic and international, and public and private; and an illumination of the ways in which practices of freedom are combined and interrelate with forms of coercion and violence. This argument is illustrated in the context of debates about the applicability of Foucauldian theory to African politics, through examples drawn from Bayart's work on globalisation, the power of development partnerships, and violence and civil war. It argues that deploying governmentality as an analytical framework, rather than seeing it as a specifically neoliberal form of power relation, can not only facilitate the application of IR theory outside Europe and North America but can also help develop a broader perspective on genuinely world politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Global environmental politics is emerging as a key field for South African diplomacy and foreign policy, in which Pretoria is endeavouring to lead by example. Environmental summits and conferences such as Johannesburg (2002) and Copenhagen (2009) have been crucial stages for the performance of this role as an environmental leader, and in December 2011 Durban will host the seventeenth Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. There are also signs from within policy-making circles that ‘the environment’ is seen as a field in which some of the lustre of South Africa’s post-1994 international high moral standing could be recovered. However, tensions remain between South Africa’s performance and rhetoric on the global stage, and domestic development paths which continue to be environmentally unsustainable. The article concludes by suggesting that while the visibility and prominence of South Africa as an actor in global environmental politics is likely to grow, it remains doubtful whether this represents a sustained and committed new direction in South African foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]