ABSTRACT
The Third World has always been a category of contrasts. Yet academics and practitioners have sought to establish a common set of determinants, e.g. historic, economic, imperialist, which would provide an understanding of, and partly explain the area’s apparent endemic political instability. Within this interpretation the relationship between the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa has been placed in the post-colonial setting of newly independent nations, artificially created by past colonial rivalry and sharing similar political features: military rule, one-party control, authoritarian government and so on. However, tensions arose within that relationship in the 1970s and critics suggested that poor Third World states had become client states of the richer Third World countries. The oil-rich Middle Eastern states distanced themselves from the detritus of economic malfunction and political instability of the poorer African nations, and were capable of creating a new Economic Order funded by petro-dollars.
