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.

For years illegal capital flight from South Africa has resulted in a staggering loss of wealth for the country. For roape.net Ben Fine investigates efforts to curb these flows of wealth. He argues that capital flight not only shifts resources elsewhere as is commonly presumed, it also shifts speculation elsewhere – capital flight is financialised.

Thomas MacManus discusses the issues of corporate crimes and killings in Africa. Focusing on the 2006 case of Trafigura – a multinational oil trading company - who offloaded hazardous waste in Côte d'Ivoire which was then dumped causing death, and suffering to thousands. MacManus argues that this case is illustrative of many instances of contemporary corporate crime, with African victims painfully let down by international legal systems.

ROAPE’s Jörg Wiegratz introduces a special issue on economic fraud in capitalist Africa. He encourages us to delve deeply into a critical analysis of fraud, its causes, characteristics, and repercussions, in the context of the long history of the relationship between capitalism and economic crime on the continent. This week we will publish two further blogs in our series on economic trickery, fraud and crime in Africa.

Across the world the extent of corporate collusion raises a range of fundamental questions relating to the manipulation of markets and capture of the policy agenda by private companies. Little is known about the extent of such collusion in so-called developing countries, in Africa in particular. Based on recent research for ROAPE, Thando Vilakazi argues that the form and extent of collusion across much of the continent points to limitations of conventional ‘governance fixes’, namely competition law, to address private cartels in Africa.