We write this editorial as news is breaking that the people of Latin America are standing up to Big Brother to the North at the 34-country Summit of the Americas. The BBC pointed to the discomfiture of George Bush with what The Economist (5 November 2005) described as ‘a rally against ‘imperialism’, by which is meant him personally, the Iraq war and the Free Trade Area of the Americas which he espouses’ (p13). Contributors to the meeting included Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan leader, who called for the death of NAFTA, the Argentinean football maestro Diego Maradona who criticised Bush’s war record, while the Argentinean leader Néstor Kirchner accused the ‘Washington consensus’ for his country’s woes.

Africa, like Latin America, has undergone decades of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) with the result that poverty has now been instituted as a familiar feature of the African economic landscape. The global resistance to the pauperisation of the African populace stemming from neo-liberal policies led to the ‘demise’ of Structural Adjustment Programmes and the emergence of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). The essence of PRSPs is to give African Governments a say in the choice of policies and a move away from what has been described as the one-size-fits-all approach of SAPs. PRSPs are supposed to facilitate the engagement of civil society (often a neo-liberal rubric for NGOs, the neo-liberal surrogate to etatism) in the developmental process, thus subverting the logic of coercion, embedded in SAP. It is increasingly doubtful if PRSPs carry the democratic mantle their proponents claim, since the neo-liberal rejection of any notion of a developmental state has left a political and economic vacuum, which can be filled only by Northern dominated NGOs, donors and the International Financial Institutions (IFI). It is for this reason we argue PRSPs for Africa are a case of Plus Ca Change Plus C'est la Meme Chose.

Indeed, this represents the underlining theme of the contributions in this issue. Duncan Holtom’s analysis of Tanzania/World Bank relations during the height of the SAP era shows how donor conditionality was acceded to. Many analyses of the move towards adjustment by individual countries tend to see it as an inevitable response to debt and balance of payments problems where states are literally ‘hemmed in’. While not refuting this analysis, Holtom reveals the subtle and not so subtle ways in which the Tanzanian Government sought to resist this imposition, in part through discursive strategies regarding what constituted ‘legitimate’ development.

Holtom distances his study from what he sees as ‘well-worn’ debates around the impacts of neo-liberal policies. While we agree, we also believe that such impact analyses tend to focus on only certain kinds of impacts and often treat African society and politics as reactions to external influences rather than having agency of their own. It is here that Musambayi Katumanga’s article on Nairobi is so powerful for he analyses the complex ways in which urban banditry has resulted from the roll-back of the state and an individualising logic among the poor. He shows how urban spaces were divided and fought over as people struggled for survival in an increasingly anomic environment. In some senses Kate Manzo’s paper on modern slavery analyses similar processes of how adjustment produces contradictory effects. She shows how slavery has been intrinsic to imperialist capitalism, but that under neo-liberalism we are seeing both deproletarianisation and a new type of feudalism, which condemns sections of the rural poor to a form of slavery.

What a study like Holtom’s also shows is that binary and static understandings of the mechanisms of imperialism are inadequate. Rather we need to unpick the complex interplay between ‘global’ discourses, national strategies and popular struggles. It is this which Susan Willett does in her contribution, ‘New Barbarians at the Gate’. She argues that the conflation of development with the ‘new security’ agenda draws attention to the increased inequalities and strong sense of injustice which now surrounds neo-liberal policies of privatisation, liberalisation and free trade. She further questions the assertion that underdevelopment and poverty are threats which have led to the securitisation of development in Africa. Thus she argues: ‘The concept of the “liberal peace“ conflates the neo-liberal economic and political projects of the Washington based institutions, with peace’, and Africa has become the laboratory par excellence of these liberal peace projects. Without justifying conflicts, she points out that until quite recently the values of the liberal peace were not shared in Europe, as differences were still settled through war. Development on its own will not make Africa more secure since the continent’s development crisis is the product of imperialist imposed economic policies, with little relevance to the needs of the vast majority of the people of Africa.

John Young picks up on the question of conflict and peace-building in his timely analysis of the Sudanese peace process and the implications of John Garang’s death upon it. He argues that the peace accord was in trouble prior to Garang’s death because in trying to accommodate Northern and Southern demands it actually cemented the differences that fomented the conflict. However, Garang was an adept and thoughtful politician who had a more complete vision for Sudan even as he practised a rather dictatorial leadership style. The leadership vacuum and the continuing failure of the international community to address the conflict holistically signal uncertain times ahead for Sudanese politics.

The summer of 2005 witnessed a major focus on the problems of Africa as the Report of the Africa Commission was published and Prime Minister Blair sought to utilise his position within the G8 and the EU to mainstream the continent’s problems. In June the Finance Ministers of the G8 nations announced the cancellation of the debts of the poorest nations owed to the IFI. As Willet has observed, the relief package contains the usual onerous conditions associated with SAPs, to the point that Sierra Leone, the poorest nation according to the UN Human Development Index was not qualified for debt relief due to failure to comply with conditionality of the country’s PRSP, though this did not prevent the question of that nation’s water supply being privatised (ROAPE 104/05).

What is clear is that the help that is being touted around is not based on noblesse oblige, but on the reconstitution of neo-colonial relations. It is important to note, and as Willett reminds us, these countries are lobbied by powerful commercial interes (the multinationals) to ensure that the aid business benefits national interests. What imperialism seeks is a new genre: the ‘model neo-colony’ that will open its markets to its manufactured goods, provide a safe haven for its investment and unrestrained avenue for profit repatriation. Poverty reduction is at best an ancillary objective within the neo-liberal project. What is sought is the mandate of the old Colonial Development and Welfare Fund, whereby British colonies can borrow capital for colonial development, in mining and other activities that were complementary to the activities of British industry.

Ankie Hoogvelt’s contribution in this issue is instructive in this respect. She foresees a new form of global stratification based on core-periphery relations with the function of the state designed to serve ‘global rather than domestic capital accumulation priorities’. Paradoxically, whilst undermining the determining relationship of the nation-state, yet, globalisation seeks to uphold the legal sovereignty of the nation-state to police its borders, ensuring its people are penned in, as well as to ensure that copyrights and patents from multinationals are safeguarded and royalties collected. Hoogvelt’s contribution also points to a number of weaknesses in the report of the African Commission. First, it is a mutational genre of the old modernisation paradigm that sought to blame Africa for its own problems, with little or no analysis on: Africa’s adverse relations with the rest of the world; capital flight and debts incurred in shady dealings with corrupt Western business people; the rapacious use of Africa’s resources and the havoc triggered by SAPs. Second, she points out that the aid is given primarily for social infrastructure and little thought is given to national development or a comprehensive agenda for economic development. She calls for a new relationship between Africa and the imperialist centre, whereby the traditional mode of accumulation via production of primary produce will be abandoned and in its place a trajectory of industrial production based on technological change.

In keeping with the editorial’s theme of continuity and change, George Caffentzis discusses the impact of the so-called ‘war on terror’ upon academic freedom. He argues that the neo-liberal model of knowledge involved commodification so that people and ideas could travel and be traded. However, post-9/11 this neo-liberal model has been superseded by a stealthy series of restrictions; on movements of people, on capital transfers, and on freedom of speech. He argues we now live in a climate of ‘torture’ where the authorities believe an ultimate and dangerous truth is out there, to be forced out and quashed. Caffentzis calls for all intellectuals to urgently resist this new regime, something we at ROAPE wholeheartedly endorse.