ABSTRACT
Allegedly, in an era of globalizations, Africa is the most marginal of the continents (Hoogvelt, 1997). However, while Africa may be the least affected by contemporary instabilities in the global financial architecture, it has been profoundly and negatively affected by the interrelated ideological, institutional and structural changes, which are reflective of myriad dimensions of ‘globalizations’ (Sassen, 1996; Held et al., 1999; UNDP, 1999; Germain, 2000; Scholte, 2000), especially the rise of ‘neo-liberalism’ since the early 1980s. Subsequently, these changes have been reinforced by the end of bipolarity and emergence of a range of ‘new’ security issues since the early 1990s, manifested in the emerging ‘human security’ agenda and discourse (Shaw and MacLean, 1999; Shaw and Schnabel, 1999). Paradoxically, however, even if the ‘Asian’ crises of the late 1990s impacted directly on this continent less than on others, the contemporary African political economy may reveal more about ‘new’ forms of regionalisms than more integrated continents and communities.
