A little over a decade ago Africa was being spoken of as the 'lost' or 'hopeless' continent in the media. Now it has some of the fastest growing economies in the world, in large part because of the impacts of a group of large developing countries - the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). In this first book to be written about the BRICS as a collective phenomenon, Carmody reveals how the BRICS powers' engagements with Africa, both individually and collectively, are often contradictory, generating new inequalities and potentialities for development. Crucially, Carmody shows how the geopolitics of the BRICS countries' involvement in Africa is impacted by and impacts upon their international relations more generally, and how the emergence of these economies has begun to alter the very nature of globalization, which is no longer purely a Western-led project.

A path-breaking examination of Africa's changing role in the world.