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The COVID-19 pandemic has offered China a unique opportunity for worldwide deployment of its longstanding health diplomacy, renamed the Health Silk Road (HSR), now an integral part of its Belt and ...

This chapter examines Russia's relations with the Maghreb. While Russia is a relatively important player in the Maghreb, the region itself is not vital for its interests. Nor did this region represent a strategic importance for the Soviet Union during the Cold War. However, like the United States, Russia did not view the Maghreb as a regional entity, it nonetheless succeeded in building good, lasting relations with the Maghreb states, particularly with Algeria. Like China today, Moscow seeks to revive those traditional relations to reassert its great power status on the world stage. To do that, Moscow has expressed more clearly its intent on defending its political, trade, security, and cultural interests. Indubitably, there are many parallels with the Soviet type of engagement in the region, without the ideological overtone that had characterized Moscow's policy during that era. Today, Moscow's policy in the Maghreb is more pragmatic and more appealing to the incumbent Maghreb governments seeking to balance out or even perhaps distance themselves from Western powers perceived as too intrusive in their domestic affairs or unsure about support from their traditional Western ally.

China’s military presence and seaport constructions in the West Pacific and the Indian Ocean have prompted hostile reactions from the US, Japan, Australia, and India. Conversely, its dual-use base ...

The collapse of the Muammar Qaddafi regime was ostensibly the prelude to a democratic Libya. The 2012 election elicited much optimism. By 2014, the domestic situation had taken an unexpected turn for the worse, resulting in two governments, one in the east and one in the west, each supported by numerous militias. While the civil war has pitted Libyans against Libyans, foreign interventions on behalf of opposite side in the conflict have hindered the end of the civil war. Indisputably, foreign interference had begun well before the civil war; however, the military backing to the protagonists has become more pronounced since 2014. The foreign powers involved in the Libyan conflict aim to fulfill specific interests, some of which deriving from the rivalries between those countries. Unless those foreign powers have achieved their goals in Libya, an end to the civil war anytime soon remains unlikely, occasional ceasefires notwithstanding.

European–North African (Maghreb) relations security relations are extremely complex. However, they are structured around three main issues: terrorism, migration, and resolving the multifaceted problems in the Sahel. The complexity of the relations between the two shores is essentially due to divergent policies and the North African states’ perceptions regarding the three issues; the divergent views are aggravated by the intra-North African tensions. While the European countries have overall relatively coherent common policies and strategies, the North African state, because of their rivalries and/or suspicions about each other, prefer to deal bilaterally with Europeans on those issues. Such disparate approaches have made EU–North African security relations more complex. Therefore, the authors of this chapter analyze the bilateral security relations, revealing implicitly the failure to build a security community between the two shores of the Mediterranean.

This chapter examines Algeria’s foreign policy from the perspective of the concept of “middlepowermanship.” As a middle power, Algeria has adopted many roles to protect its national interests and the preservation of its regime. The main argument in this chapter is that Algeria was destined to be a middle power, but for reasons that will be elucidated, policymakers have refrained from advancing the state as a middle power with the potential of being a regional hegemon in the Maghreb-Sahel region. Thus, the objective is to highlight the lingering difficulty in adequately classifying Algeria’s foreign policy and to understand why such a major country is unwilling to play a regional and international role concomitant with its military and economic capacities.

After the 2011 revolution, the new Libyan authorities launched a political and constitutional debate, which focused, inter alia, on democracy and the role of women in the new order. The autonomous initiatives of women’s associations, which demanded female quotas and equal rights, is an important aspect of the post-revolution reality and highlights the contradictions between the cultural conditions and the policies of the authoritarian past in a society that for the most part aspires for equal rights, the nature of its neo-patriarchy1 notwithstanding. In this article, the authors analyse the historical trajectory of women’s claims and the contributions of women’s associations to the constitutional debate for women’s rights. Women’s activism has characterised this new era, one full of incongruities, such as the opposition of past ideas against innovative, more modernist, progressive ones.

‘Quasi-mediation diplomacy’ refers to the role a ‘mediating’ state plays in international activities to defend its commercial, political and diplomatic interests rather than core security and strategic interests. This type of mediator acts without seeking to dominate; to follow rather than to lead; to partake in the revision of the agenda rather than setting it; and, to encourage conflict de-escalation in lieu of determinedly engaging in conflict resolution. The dynamics of China’s quasi-mediation diplomacy in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) depend on their relevance to China’s vital commercial interests, the scope of China’s influence, the level of the great powers’ consensus and the intractability of crisis settlement. Through a comprehensive interchange of the above-mentioned variables, China-styled quasi-mediation diplomacy rests on risk-aversion, revealing divergent forms which can be categorized at four levels, namely, multifaceted intervention, proactive involvement, limited interce...

Seaports are crucial pivots connecting a state’s national economy with the world economy. As the largest developing country and one of the largest seaport constructors and operators in the world, C...

This chapter examines China’s presence in Algeria through its multifaceted relations—political, economic, diplomatic, energy, military, cultural, and commercial. It looks at how the two countries view the interests that bind them and what factors account for the considerable development of these relations. China considers Algeria a pivotal state and a geopolitical asset in North Africa. The authors seek to understand why despite the close ties between the two countries, China has not sided with Algeria on the conflict in Western Sahara, a question critical to Algeria’s national security interests. Despite their strong development, relations between Algeria and China have yet to reach their potential, the “global strategic partnership” binding them notwithstanding.

The Islamist movement in Algeria and Islamist ideas (politicized/revivalist, Islamic reformism) date back to the colonial period. While Radical Islamist Groups (RIGs) and Salafi Jihadist Groups (SJGs) have demonstrated a high level of violence more noticeably in the 1990s, following the return of the so-called Afghans, who had trained and fought Soviet troops in Afghanistan, radical Islamism has emerged at different periods in Algeria’s history. In the 1960s, RIGs sought to intimidate Westernized youth and women. In the 1970s and 1980s, SJGs almost destroyed the state through a ferocious armed insurgency. The major SJGs in Algeria, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and Jund-el-Khalifa, are part of the transnational extremist organizations such as al-Qaeda and, since 2014, the so-called Islamic State (IS), respectively. Political Islam in Algeria took different forms, from quietist groups to peaceful Muslim Brothers to sanguinary armed groups, such as the Armed Islamic Groups (GIAs) of the 1990s or the al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which succeed the Salafi Group for Preaching and CombatSGPC. Whatever form the movement has taken more recently, one cannot understand Islamism without scrutinizing Algeria’s colonial history and the enduring crisis of identity it has engendered among Algerian Muslims. Soon after the colonial invasion, resistance to France was often expressed in Islamic terms, such as jihad, or holy war, against infidels. During the war of national liberation [1954–1962], the nationalist movement referred to the fighters as mujahideen (holy warriors). Algerian identity itself is often expressed in relation to Islam, which dominates social and cultural personality. Islam and Islamism have served as means of opposition to the successive incumbent regimes since independence. Indeed, opposition to the socialism of the 1960s and 1970s emanated from religious figures. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Islamic Salvation Front ak.a., FIS), a mass party, sought to seize power to establish a state in which Shari’a Law could be implemented. The cancellation of the electoral process resulted in bloody civil strife that pitted the security forces against SJGs of different denominations. The civil strife claimed the lives of perhaps 100,000 people, mostly civilians. However, Algerian Islamism also has elected representatives, with legal Islamist parties represented in the government. Islamism, or Islamist ideas, present during the anticolonial struggle are interwoven with the radical jihadi groups that exist in the region and country today. Algeria went through an almost decade-long, atrocious period of civil strife that abated by the end of the 1990s. The ensuing 2005 National Charter on Peace and Reconciliations provided a political framework for stability in the country.

Since the outbreak of the Arab revolts in late 2010, China has adhered to its ‘business-first’ economic diplomacy towards the Arab countries, a policy driven by China's ongoing geoeconomic interests. The ten-year-old China–Arab States Cooperation Forum serves as the nucleus for China's economic diplomacy in the region. The Chinese authorities have also initiated interagency coordination and central–local governments' power sharing in order to pursue this diplomacy successfully. However, while its economic diplomacy may be evolving, China, unlike what it has achieved in Black Africa, seems to have failed to develop strategic, political and cultural exchanges with its Arab counterparts. The intertwined geopolitical and geoeconomic factors that have emerged since the Arab revolts might make it harder for China to reap economic benefits while shelving political entanglement to sustain this economic diplomacy in the longer run.

Even prior to the country's independence, Africa has always been central to Algeria's foreign policy. Algerian nationalists not only found support on the African continent in their struggle for independence, but they also sought to contribute to the decolonization of Africa and to free it from all forms of neocolonialism. Algerian diplomacy became even more involved in African affairs after independence. Using the Role Approach, this article shows how Algerian policymakers exercised various roles within the structures of the Organization of African Unity and, to this day, in those of the African Union to serve the country's perceived national interests. While from the 1960s through the 1990s, Algerians played the roles of developer, mediator, and anti-imperialist, since the 1990s, they have played the role of antiterrorist in order partly to regain the credibility that the regime had lost during the domestic civil strife. The antiterrorist role has been relatively successful as the country succeeded in gr...

Since the establishment of the Chin-Arab States Cooperation Forum (CASCF) in 2004, the two sides have forged special political relations. Such a special relationship, different from that of a milit...