Africa's Strategic Pivots: From China's Rise to Tradeoff Between Battling Covid-19 and Violent Extremism

Spurred by the expansive shared prosperity of its Belt and Road Initiative, China was winning the economic component of its Great Power Competition with the United States in Africa. Then Covid-19 spread to Africa in February 2020. By spring Africa's honeymoon with China was over. China's Covid-19 related discrimination against Africa as well as disruption in both the supply chain and the Belt and Road Initiative weakened bilateral ties. While nobody expects China to lose its place as Africa's biggest bilateral lending and trading partner, Sino-African ties are strained. Not surprisingly, Africa turned inward and focused on its fight against the invisible Covid-19 enemy. But Africa soon found itself in a new tradeoff between battling Covid-19 and violent extremism. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

The democratic transformation of public policy through community activism in Brazil

This article explores transformational change in public policy through community-based governance and the collective design of experience-oriented policy and action. Using a critical -interpretive theoretical perspective, we derived three key lessons in achieving this change from the experience of Parais??polis, a Brazilian favela made famous for its COVID-19 successful response plan, despite historical state abandonment and overlapping vulnerabilities. The three lessons were (i) proximity coordination, (ii) collective learning, and (iii) affectionate relationality. All three underpinned the principle of ???community activism??? and ???deliberative empowerment???, which in turn were both crucial in effecting democratic transformations. Through our case study of Parais??polis, we argue that transformational change crucially involved civil society engagement alongside inclusive deliberative forums. This reinforces the need to pursue a policy research agenda attentive to sociocentric experiences, ordinary actors and the emotions and values underlying public action.

All as One to One for All Comparing Chinese Australian Responses to Racism during the "Hanson Debate" and COVID-19

The recent racism toward Chinese Australians arising from the C OVm-19 pandemic recalls the shape and scale of racism last seen during the "Hanson debate" of the late 199os - so-named for the anti-Asian immigration and anti-multicultural positions Pauline Hanson advanced in Australian politics and society. Further linking these two moments are the responses to racism coming from Chinese Australian individuals and community organizations. In each period, the different backgrounds of various Chinese Australian communities and their representative organizations influenced their modes of responding to racism. Over the years, however, the prominence of a small number of "community leaders" and organizations responding to racism has increasingly eclipsed grassroots responses to racism. I argue that this shift represents a "professionalization" of Chinese Australian responses to racism;partly explaining the form that present responses take, while also problematizing the relationship between the "community representatives" and the "communities being represented."