Western

will continue to look to Africa’s vote-rich 55-country bloc for support of its actions and international legitimacy. The West too will lean on its African partners — leveraging development aid and access to its markets as a carrot-and-stick approach to enforcing compliance. There will be talk of China’s divergence from “shared values” and a need to protect the international system. The discourse usually implies a certain illegitimacy to the presence of non-Western actors in Africa. In this narrative China and, to a large extent, Russia are projected as invariably malign in intent as opposed to the putatively benign objectives of Western actors.