Download or read book The Dynamics of Economic and Political Relations Between Africa and Foreign Powers written by Tukumbi Lumumba-Kasongo and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1999-01-30 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: International relations at large and Africa's in particular are shaped by the actors' historical location, by what they offer economically and culturally, and by who they are socially. In international relations nations tend to deal with objective conditions as they are or as they are perceived. However, Lumumba-Kasongo demonstrates through case-studies of Liberia and Zaire/Congo that what the objective conditions are may not necessarily be what they ought to be in the national development process. The international struggle for power between the West and the East and their supportive brutal and oppressive states in the South, especially in Africa, created the extremely weak conditions that redefined international relations as the tools of domination, rather than the tools of understanding and cooperation. As Lumumba-Kasongo clarifies, Africa did not gain economically or developmentally from this struggle. An important work for scholars and researchers of contemporary Africa and international relations in general.