ABSTRACT

This paper critically analyses Africa’s ‘Ports Race’, the massive increase in port infrastructure investment taking place across the continent since the mid-2000s. It argues that the phenomenon shapes, and is shaped by, three interconnected trends: (1) an emerging material–political–institutional lock-in to a new extractivist paradigm of capital accumulation; (2) continental governments’ growing embrace of state-led development strategies; and (3) the repackaging of globalized discourses of connectivity and idealized visions of modernity by elites to legitimize both their own political positions and what are often exploitative and environmentally destructive practices/processes. Taken together, these developments point to novel configurations of engagement playing out across the continent between transnational capital and political elites.

摘要

本文批判性地分析了非洲的“港口竞赛”，即自 2000 年代中期以来整个非洲大陆港口基础设施投资的大幅增加。它认为，这种现象塑造了三种相互关联的趋势，并被三种相互关联的趋势所塑造：(1) 新兴的物质-政治-制度锁定资本积累的新榨取主义范式；(2) 大陆政府越来越接受国家主导的发展战略；(3) 精英们重新包装全球化的连通性话语和理想化的现代性愿景，以使他们自己的政治立场以及通常是剥削和破坏环境的做法/过程合法化。总而言之，这些发展表明跨国资本和政治精英之间在整个大陆上演的新颖的接触结构。