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For roape.net Magdi el Gizouli provides a detailed account of the revolutionary crisis in Sudan. Events started on 18 and 19 December last year in the small city of Atbara, but soon spread across the country. However, the forces of counter-revolution in the country are formidable. Importers, wholesale merchants, bankers, military and security officers, large landowners, sharia scholars and preachers embedded in Islamic banks, all have stakes in maintaining in the current regime. Magdi el Gizouli argues that to dismantle their powers and to fulfil the promise of the Atbara moment requires a revolution in Leninist terms. The country and its peoples have been subject to deep and dramatic socio-economic changes of which the current wave of protest is a symptom, it is so far unclear whether the leadership of the protest movement can turn elemental anger into systemic agency.

ROAPE's Ray Bush introduces Volume 51 Issue 181 of the journal, a special 50th anniversary issue on imperialism and Africa. The role of imperialism in undermining African sovereignty and independence has been a recurrent theme in ROAPE since the journal's first issue editorial back in 1974. Here, Bush interrogates what imperialism is, how it may have changed over time, and with what consequences.

There is an ongoing effort to archive the materials of Arghiri Emmanuel (1911-2001), a Greek-French theorist and author of the seminal 1972 critique of imperialism Unequal Exchange. In the process of creating this archive, the Arghiri Emmanuel Association discovered new information about Emmanuel’s time in the Belgian Congo (1937-1941 and 1946-1960). Here, in the second of this two-part instalment (the first post can be found here), Héritier Ilonga details Emmanuel's relationship with leader of the rebel socialist Free Republic of Congo, Antoine Gizenga, considers the complex nature of his relationship with Lumumba, and reveals Emmanuel's insistence that socialism - not capitalism - must come first in the Congo.

This article by Farwa Sial examines the West's new development strategy towards Africa, which mirrors the "white elephants" of the 1970s with its focus on expensive and unproductive infrastructure projects, as an effort to counter the Belt and Road Initiative and the continent’s growing ties with China.

Angela Chukunzira writes about a protest movement in Kenya that has changed the country. The current regime has constantly bowed to western imperialism and the Finance Bill was an effort to offset Kenya’s debt to the Bretton Woods Institutions by imposing heavy taxation and economic hardships on the poor. Armed with smartphones and dance moves, Gen-Z took to the streets to redefine Kenyan protest culture.

After Voices for African Liberation: Conversations with the Review of African Political Economy, ROAPE is pleased to publish a new edited collection, Capitalism and Economic Crime in Africa: The Neoliberal Period. The volume brings together a collection of research articles, briefings and blog posts that were published over a period of nearly 40 years (1986–2023), in our journal and on our website. Here, the book's editor Jörg Wiegratz introduces the book, followed by Yusuf Serunkuma's foreword to the collection. Both Wiegratz and Serunkuma firmly locate economic crime in Africa within a global, neoliberal capitalist order that sustains accumulation in the global centres of power and wealth and reproduces dependency and underdevelopment on the continent.

ROAPE interviews Mark Duffield about his life and work. For decades Mark has worked on the political philosophy of the permanent emergency, the current global crisis in capitalism, the war economy, and the political and economic situation in the Horn of Africa. From his early days growing up in the West Midlands, to his research in Sudan, and later examining the militant struggles of Indian workers in the UK, Duffield has spent a lifetime examining at the central dynamics underpinning our interconnected world of genocide and imperialism.   

The Central African Republic has, despite being at the centre of the continent, been a country on the margins of global power since independence. Despite a conflict which has lasted for more than a decade, the country remains largely ignored. Ben Jackson writes that while African conflicts are often underreported, for example the war in Sudan barely gets a mention, the situation in the Central African Republic demands our attention.

Jesse Harasta describes the complex dynamics of contemporary imperialism and resistance. He argues that understanding a world system divided into Core, Semi-Periphery and Periphery is essential for unpicking and analysing the real workings of global capitalism today. Harasta states that Gulf states have engaged in an active imperial re-peripheralization of the Horn of Africa, which has had devastating consequences but it has also triggered resistance, and important political confrontations.

On CLR James’ 123rd birthday, Matthew Quest examines the collaboration between James and George Padmore since their partnership within the International African Service Bureau in the 1930s. Despite their joint activism in Pan-African affairs, political rifts emerged on democracy, socialism, and revolutionary strategy. Quest looks at James’ portrayal of Padmore to highlight the political tensions underlying their friendship. James' and Padmore's different perspectives on anti-imperialism reveals hidden disputes in the Black radical tradition.