Author: Cobus van Staden
Dr. Cobus van Staden is an accomplished scholar, journalist, and think tank analyst with more than 20 years of experience in Africa and Asia. Previously, he was the senior China-Africa researcher at the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) in Johannesburg. Cobus completed his Ph.D. in Japanese studies and media studies at the University of Nagoya in Japan in 2008. He focused on comparisons of Chinese and Japanese public diplomacy in Africa during postdoctoral positions at the University of Stellenbosch and the SARCHI Chair on African Diplomacy and Foreign Policy at the University of Johannesburg before joining the Department of Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2013. His academic research focused on media coverage of the China-Africa and Japan-Africa relationships, as well as the use of media in public diplomacy in the Global South.
Related Posts
Navigating Our Endless Now
Foreign policy writers are in danger of running out of cliches. How often can one reuse the old Lenin line of “weeks where decades happen”? But here we are: in one week, India and Pakistan crept closer to full war, ...
Middle Powers Scan an Emerging Landscape
If, like me, you’ve fallen into the habit of obsessively checking the newest (and the newest and the newest) updates on the U.S.-China trade war, you’ll also be familiar with the weird candy/poison hit of a major trade war data-point dropping. In my case this morning, it ...
Xi Emphasizes Trade as He Kicks Off Southeast Asian Tour
Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi on Monday, the first visit in his tour of Southeast Asia. He was met by the country’s President Lu’o’ng Cu’ò’ng. Xi will also make stops in Malaysia and Cambodia. Trade will likely be the dominant theme ...
Trump, China, and the Big, Baffling World
Amid the upheavals of Donald Trump’s first weeks back as U.S. president, a key point of overlap between his shredding of the Atlantic partnership and his ending of U.S. foreign assistance to the developing world has been largely ignored: the impact of these choices’ impact ...
The CGSP Take: Where Does the Munich Security Conference Leave the Global South?
This year’s Munich Security Conference provided two distinct messages on foreign policy from Washington and Beijing. In his speech on Friday, U.S. Vice President JD Vance framed European politics through a U.S. culture war lens. His broadsides against traditional allies implicitly questioned the idea of the unified ...
Africa, China, and Trump’s World-Spanning Gamble on Foreign Assistance
The Trump administration’s decision to halt and review U.S. foreign assistance to developing countries instantaneously turned the United States from many countries’ biggest helper into their biggest problem. In the process, he kicked off a massive experiment. The research question ...
Trump’s Executive Orders, China, and the Global South
U.S. President Donald Trump signed a raft of executive orders on his first day in office that will significantly shift the United States’s relationship with the developing world. The orders, while framed as promoting the interests of the U.S. voters, will ...
What does Trump 2.0 Offer to Africa?
By Cobus van Staden As the world shifts into gear for the next Trump term, striking new polling results have revealed a split in opinion about the incoming president. An opinion survey of ...
What does Trump 2.0 Offer to Africa?
As the world shifts into gear for the next Trump term, striking new polling results have revealed a split in opinion about the incoming president. An opinion survey of developed and developing countries by the European Council on Foreign ...
Africa-China 2025: Tracking Priorities on Both Sides
2025 marks a quarter-century since the first Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) summit. Since then, Africa-China engagement has been nothing short of transformational - both changing skylines across the continent and reshaping the role of the Global South in world politics more broadly.
3 Key Trends to Watch for China-Global South Ties in 2025
Trend-predicting – always a dicey enterprise – feels particularly difficult as the Biden administration dries to a crusty stain, and incoming U.S. President Donald Trump waits in the wings huddled in his signature cloud of white-hot incoherence. However, tracking a few ...
2024 Was the Year China Was Everywhere, All the Time
Every year, the team at the China-Global South Project makes a list of what we saw as the significant China-related stories of the last twelve months. This year, the task has been especially tricky. That's not because there is a lack ...