China's African Policy and its Soft Power

Luo Jianbo & Zhang Xiaomin

Luo Jianbo, of the Central Party School of the Communist Party of China, and Zhang Xiaomin, of Beijing Foreign Studies University, put forward their recommendations for China's foreign policy in Africa with a view to the improvement of China's international image. They give voice to an oft-neglected perspective in foreign policy studies, that of Chinese academia, and provide us with an insight into the principles guiding China's foreign policy-making.

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The Enigmatic Figure of the Non-Western Thinker in International Relations

Dr. Robbie Shilliam

Robbie Shilliam discusses the marginalisation of non-Western perspectives in the discipline of International Relations, and seeks to provoke a 'critical engagement with the non-Western subject as thinker rather than as object' of thought. For him, this engagement has the potential to retrieve the 'global-colonial' rather than the 'narrowly European or Western context within which thought on the modern experience has been developed', thereby providing 'deeper insights into the racial, religious, and cultural dimensions of the making of the modern world'.

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