The Political Impact of the Sino-U.S. Oil Competition in Africa is an important contribution to the current discussions about the development and security implications of the US-Sino competition for oil in Africa’s petro-states. The book focuses on the impact of the growing role of China, on these countries’ acceptance of Western policies in general and those of the U.S. in particular. It uses recent U.S. attempts to promote democratic governance in countries like Chad, Angola and Sudan to show how China’s competing presence in these African petro-states gradually reduced America’s leverage over them. It demonstrates that the level of these African countries’ vulnerability to Washington’s policies depends on the intensity of the Sino-U.S. competition within their oil sector.

 

The book also contributes to the corpus of theories on resource curse and interdependence through a rigorous review of existing literature, which exposes the inadequacies of existing analyses, and proffers new theoretical insights and methods of measuring inter-state relations.

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Didier Tchoffo Djoumessi holds a Ph.D. in political science and is an assistant lecturer at the Chair of International Relations and Foreign Policy of the University of Cologne, Germany. His research interests include development and security studies, African affairs, and international political economy. He is a member of the Cologne Working Group on the Transformation of Political Order. Dr. Djoumessi has helped to organise many conferences on Sino-African relations and has published articles on the topic. He also works as trainer at the InWEnt (Capacity Building International) Preparation Centre for Development Cooperation in Germany and was recently an Electoral Advisor at the United Nation Operations in Côte d’Ivoire (UNOCI)