Engaging the Global South with Ideology and Pragmatism: Russia’s Re-Emergence in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Russian foreign policy aims to subvert the West-centered world order established after the Cold War. While promoting the post-Western civilizational and “post-colonial” ideology since the mid-2010s, Moscow has been pragmatic and dependent on its limited foreign policy resources, on the one hand, and the mixed receptivity of different audiences to Russia’s ideological message, on the other. To test this argument, the paper selects three cases from Sub-Saharan Africa, where Russia has been increasingly active since the 2000s, for a closer investigation. Moscow has advanced limited and nonideological goals in Nigeria as a status quo country. Toward South Africa, Russia has promoted the message of gradual change and building new global institutions because Johannesburg shares a considerable part of Moscow’s ideological agenda of confronting Western “(neo)colonialism.” Finally, in the Central African Republic, Russia has embraced radically anti-Western policies, providing security, weapons, and ideological justification for anti-Western leaders in power. These ideologically diverse relations have brought Moscow significant political dividends despite its considerably more limited resources than during the Cold War era.