News reporting of foreign interventions on the African continent has positioned Africa as exploitable and lacking an ability to develop independently of external powers. Contemporary commercial and military interactions between African countries and powers like the US, France, and China are variously depicted as neo-imperialism bringing little benefit, or as welcome ‘partnership’ under African control. This project expands on a prior study (Paterson & Nothias, 2016) to explore the dynamics of this dichotomous discourse about African autonomy in the face of ongoing foreign interventions and involvement. Recent optimistic narratives of “Africa Rising” contrast with longstanding patterns of negative reporting broadly characterized as “Afro-pessimist.” Referencing military, commercial, and religious expansions into Africa originating from the US and state-sponsored commercial interventions by China, Bunce et al (2016) note concerns that such narratives “perpetuate a neo-colonial framing of the continent by presenting Africa as a site for international intervention and resource extraction” and conclude that “the meaning and implications of these new representations requires further research.”
There is a nascent and lively literature engaging the Chinese involvement in Africa, including: the global, Chinese and African media portrayal of Sino-African relations; the involvement of China on African media landscapes and infrastructure; and the intertwinement of these with China’s public diplomacy objectives. US military intervention in Africa, for its part, is becoming a focus of international relations and political science scholarship (e.g., Moore & Walker, 2016) making investigation of the facilitating or inhibiting role of the international news media especially pertinent. Finally, French military involvements, while particularly impactful in several countries such as Mali or the Central African Republic, are seldom being studied from the vantage point of international media. Our paper, based on research for a current British Academy funded project, seeks to answer the following research question: “to what extent do global media portray a diverse range of perspectives about French, US, and Chinese foreign interventions on the African continent, and what are the key influences on the narratives provided?”
Our analysis is structured in two moments. Firstly, we provide results from a comparative content analysis of two years (2015, 2016) of coverage of those involvements in Africa in a selection of international online news sources (All Africa, Al Jazeera, BBC, CCTV, CNN, France 24). We compare the perspectives that are given prominence, ignored or diminished in global media by notably analyzing the thematic and geographical framing of the articles, their tones, the voices that have a space in the coverage, how often the legitimacy of these involvements are called into question, and the extent to which the coverage reproduces tropes of Africa Rising or social disorder. Secondly, we draw on 15 interviews conducted with a range of journalists working for international media in Kenya and South Africa to shed light on the range of influences shaping the coverage. By combining the examination of media content and production, we aim to capture the dynamics behind the production of – and struggle over – international representations of foreign interventions in Africa.