A little over a decade ago Africa was being spoken of in the media as the ‘lost’ or ‘hopeless’ continent. Now it has some of the fastest growing economies in the world, largely because of the impact of the BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. In this first book to be written about the BRICS as a collective phenomenon, Padraig Carmody reveals how their engagements with Africa, both individually and collectively, are often contradictory, generating new inequalities and potential for development. Crucially, Carmody shows how the geopolitics of the BRICS countries’ involvement in Africa is impacted by and impacts upon their international relations more generally, and how the emergence of these economies has begun to alter the very nature of globalization, which is no longer purely a Western-led project.

This is a path-breaking examination of Africa’s changing role in the world.