With abundant resources and growing markets, the African continent is once again at the centre of a new ‘great game of courtship’ between the established and rising powers. However, compared with previous decades, African countries are no longer passive players in international relations. This article explores Africa's recent negotiating behaviour in relation to a selected set of actors that animate the current shifting global economic order: rising powers, established powers and international organizations. Despite potential sources of bargaining leverage, most African countries (with some notable exceptions) are still reactive to the bilateral overtures of Brazil, China and India and unable to set the terms of engagement. Nonetheless, the rise of these new powers provides alternative negotiating partners (and potentially more developmental outcomes) to the established powers. By comparison, at the multilateral level the African Group has been far more active and assertive in contesting global governance in the pursuit of greater distributive justice, particularly in the climate, trade and security regimes. This has taken place largely through the adroit use of distributive bargaining and tactics, supplemented by normative‐based strategies highlighting Africa's underdevelopment. The central argument of the article is that African countries require judicious negotiating strategies, improved deliberative capacities and coalitions with local/continental/global civil society and business networks in order to ameliorate their weaker bargaining power and reshape the terms of their engagement with their international partners, particularly the rising powers.

As the largest African economy and the leading African aid-provider, with plans to establish an aid agency, South Africa is often ranked among the developing world's 'emerging donors'. However, the country's development cooperation commitments are smaller in scope, scale and ambition than the aid regimes of the BRIC (

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This study analyses the supply chains for medical goods across the Commonwealth countries. It assesses trade flows related to the health sector and, more specifically, import and export data for essential COVID-19 medical supplies. It also explores supply chain disruptions (trade interruptions, changes in consumption and tariffs related to imports) caused in the wake of COVID-19. Based on the analysis and key findings, it proposes policy changes and recommendations to increase the resilience of these supply chains, to protect them from such disruptions. The analysis finds that the global production and trade in COVID-19-related medical goods is highly concentrated. The European Union and the United States monopolise the production of high-tech equipment such as ventilators and oxygen therapy equipment, while China is a leading supplier of personal protective equipment (PPE). Intra-Commonwealth trade in medical supplies is relatively small, with exports mainly dominated by the developed countries and imports by large developing countries. The analysis also finds that export restrictions and high tariffs in many member countries are hampering the trade in medical supplies, and hence reducing its resilience to major shocks such as COVID-19.