Debating the Year of Africa.

Rarely can there have been so much media attention on Africa as there was in the twelve months leading up to the G8 summit in July 2005. The crescendo of media coverage which greeted the Commission for Africa's report and the following Live8, Make Poverty History and G8 gatherings came after a year which had seen the launch and subsequent deliberations of the Commission for Africa, Blair's and Brown's various high profile initiatives on aid and debt, the WTO's stalled 'development round' and NGO's ongoing campaigns around all of these. This focus on Africa, led by the UK which held EU and G8 presidencies in 2005, was reflected in a renewed academic focus on Africa and a restating, and some revitalisation, of debates about Africa's politics and development. Such attention spread beyond the normal confines of specialist 'Africanist' publications with a substantial amount of comment and analysis reaching more generalist readerships. Included among these a number of journal special issues which took Africa as their focus and came out in the twelve months leading up to the G8 summit in Huyly 2005. Perhsaps rather unusually, this article will review three of these special issues in order to get a flavour of the scope and orientation of some of the debates which have arisen. However, by focusing on special issues in non-Africanist journals, it also allows us to consider in what ways they may or may not add to perspectives one might find in the more specialist literature and to assess whether and how the particular orientation of the journals influences their framing of debates. Indeed, the three journals reviewed come from rather different locations in academia: International Affairs is one of the leading British international relations journals, produced by Chatham House; Historical Materialism is an interdisciplinary journal dedicated to exploring critical and explanatory Marxism; and Global Dialogue is the house journal of the Centre for World Dialogue, which aims to promote debate of political, social, economic and religious issues of global concern. As we shall see, this lends a particular flavour to each special issue and shapes the ways in which African development issues are interpreted. However, one of the features of all three publications is that the contributions they contain range over a very wide analytical terrain, making each a broad survey rather than an internally-cohesive debate. As a result, the bulk of this review will focus on the substantive debate which cut across all three publications. In the concluding section I will return to some more general consideration of the special issues themselves. The three themes which emerge across all three issues, and which will serve as a framework for this review, are: recent policy responses to Africa's development challenge; broader understandings of the development of capitalism and Africa; and the specific debates around the South Africa/southern African conjuncture.