Africa Under the Multipolar Scramble: Post-Colonial Sovereignty and the Continental Theater of Great-Power Competition

Abstract

The Africa theater is the continental geography on which the multipolar scramble for resources, security architecture, and institutional alignment is most actively contested between US-aligned, Sino-Russian-aligned, Gulf-aligned, and emerging Indian and Turkish poles. The theater's master variable is the rate at which the post-colonial sovereignty arrangement that organized African geopolitics across the 1960-2020 period dissolves under multipolar pressure, and the configuration that replaces it as the continental state system reorients around new partnership structures, security architectures, and resource extraction arrangements. The dissolution operates across the Sahel coup wave and Russian Africa Corps consolidation, the comprehensive French strategic retreat from West Africa, the BRICS+ formal expansion through Ethiopia and Egypt, the Chinese Belt and Road infrastructure penetration, and the Trump administration's pragmatic recalibration toward transactional engagement with post-coup governments.