The BRICS group wrapped up its two-day leaders’ summit in Rio de Janeiro on Monday. The summit’s final communique is a 16,000-word doorstop that covers numerous issues from economics to education.
The communique avoids any direct mention of the United States, and references to “unilateralism” and other coded criticism are also relatively scarce. Rather, the communique keeps the focus on the BRICS’ vision of the strengthening and reform of the global multilateral system ...
Category: Global Gateway
Global Gateway in Africa: Europe’s Answer to China’s Belt and Road
The European Commission's Global Gateway initiative will turn three years old in December. The $300 billion infrastructure initiative was launched with great fanfare to provide developing countries in Africa and elsewhere with an alternative to China's Belt and Road Initiative.
The Scholarly Debate Over Whether China Aims to ‘Weaponize’ the Global South Against the U.S.
There's an increasingly widespread perception among some scholars and government officials in the U.S. that China is leveraging its considerable influence in developing countries to mobilize them against the U.S.-led international order. Michael Shuman, a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic ...
Scholars, Analysts Meet in Washington to Discuss China’s Influence in the Global South
Scholars and analysts from around the world gathered at the Washington, D.C. headquarters of The Atlantic Council think tank on Wednesday for a two-day conference focused on evaluating China's growing influence in Asia, Africa, the Americas and other developing regions. The ...
China Gathers Global South Support for UN Human Rights Review
The Chinese government is reportedly lobbying non-Western countries to support its human rights record as it faces a United Nations Human Rights Council review on Tuesday. Diplomats told Reuters that China’s mission to the UN in Geneva sent memos to counterparts ...
EU’s Global Gateway Moves Forward on DRC-Angola Corridor in Bid to Counter China
The European Union and the United States will launch the early stages of a logistics corridor linking the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia to an export facility in Angola. This was one of the key announcements on the second day of ...
Analysis from Cobus van Staden
EU’s Global Gateway Forum Aims to Take On China’s Belt and Road
Wednesday and Thursday will see leaders from twenty countries gathering in Brussels for the Global Gateway Forum, the newest step in the EU’s global infrastructure scheme. The forum comes a week after China’s Belt and Road Forum, which gathered representatives from about 130 countries. ...
Re-Election of China’s Man at the Food & Agriculture Organization Could Reverberate in the Global South
By Felix Brender Earlier this month, China’s Qu Dongyu was re-elected as head of the UN’s Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO). Media coverage was rather muted inside and outside China, where official media foregrounded Qu’s being the first Chinese in such a role and ...
Xi Bets on Global South in Moscow
Today is a public holiday in South Africa – Human Rights Day. There’s a certain irony in spending the day focusing on China’s President Xi Jinping’s visit to Vladimir Putin, knee-deep in a human rights disaster. What one makes of the ...
EU’s Answer to China’s BRI Takes Shape in Africa
The European Union unveiled a $776 million infrastructure financing package for Africa on Tuesday as part of its Global Gateway initiative that is aimed at challenging China's growing influence in developing regions. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen ...
China-based Development Bank to Ramp Up Lending by $10 Billion a Year
While China's two major policy banks have pulled hard on the reins to curtail development financing in the Global South, the Beijing-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank is going in the opposite direction. AIIB's President Jin Liqun told the Financial Times that the ...
The Only Way is South
Earlier this week, we highlighted a tweet from the Africa News journalist Ronald Kato: “Can safely argue at this point that the recent EU-Africa summit was a waste of time. The Global Gway is dead.”
China, Africa and the War in Ukraine
With the Russian military now moving on Ukraine, the consequences of Europe's latest war are being felt around the world. Asian markets fell sharply today while oil prices shot up, crossing the $100 mark for the first time in seven years. ...