Robert Ward, who coined the term CIVETS (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa), also discussed the notion of "second-generation emerging powers", which denotes countries with young populations and rapidly developing, diversified economies. Given the current faltering fortunes of the BRICS states, this paper seeks to explore whether these second-generation emerging powers will be the ones to continue generating expanded rounds of accumulation within the international system. As most of the BRICS countries lurch from crisis to crisis, are the second-generation emerging powers likely to be the continued drivers of global growth at the middle tier of global capital accumulation? Will cyclical booms and busts, BRICS "exhaustion" in places like Africa, and a depletion of BRICS' political economies, open up further opportunities and give rise to the dominance of new clusters, and will these states continue along the same lines as their BRICS counterparts? Are we seeing the rise of second-generation sub-imperialists?

India's involvement with Africa goes back a long way to the early days of African independence movements in the 1960s and before. However, the current level and intent of India's involvement is on a different plane altogether. In those early days, India had looked towards African countries within the context of an emerging Afro-Asian solidarity among Third World countries. India's presence was notable in infrastructure projects in East African countries, besides assistance in setting up small scale industries in different African countries. India provided various other forms of aid, under the Indian Technical and Economic Co-operation program.

However, during the first decade of the 21st century, the scope of India-Africa cooperation increased rapidly. This was especially due to India's emergence as an important player in the world economy and its significant need for oil and other natural resources. This is evident from India-Africa Forum Summits where India offered significant loans, grants and development assistance to woo African countries.

In this paper, I have attempted to document the changing dynamics of India's engagement with Africa, with the focus primarily on trade, investment, official development assistance and capacity building activities. Focus of the article would be to examine whether India's investment and trade have benefited African countries or is similar to earlier colonial pattern. Are India's development assistance and capacity building programmes relevant to African needs? Have they contributed to improving economic, political and social sectors of African countries? Have they helped structural transformation of African economies?

The paper offers a discussion over Thailand's foreign policy aspirations and actions towards the African continent within a larger framework of South-South linkages and dependencies. Focal attention will be paid to the Thai perspective, in particular what is behind the "Thai-Africa Initiative" of 2013, which is part of the Royal Thai Government's "Look West Policy". The paper will critically look at similarities and differences with other Asian actors' policies and their engagements with Africa. The analysis is based on recent field research in Bangkok, as well as numerous conference debates over the Afro-Asian context of Bandung. A rarely investigated Afro-Asian linkage will be revealed in light of the "new political economy of Afro-Asian ties".

China's oil ties with African countries have garnered a great deal of attention from scholars and practitioners. There has been a wealth of knowledge produced regarding China's oil policy in the region, its rationales and achievements. According to one popular narrative, China has been trying to lock in access to oil, taking advantage of weak African states, striking outlandishly favourable deals and often pursuing a resource grabbing policy in the region. There has been a very limited effort, however, to trace and explain China's inroads into Africa using technological lenses and refining economics, which gives drastically less room for political fiction and speculations. What role China's own refining capacity has played in the China's ongoing energy quest in Africa? How a huge diversity in the quality of African oil, namely sulphur content and API gravity - from heavy Ugandan oil to famous sweet and light Nigerian Bonny Light - has informed China's oil policy? Answering these questions can shed more light on the way China has been navigating the African oil industry. This article aims to revisit the literature on China's oil ties with Africa through the technological lenses, to see how much of China's oil policy in the region is a result of refining economics.

So-called emerging donors from the East have refreshed debates on the motives for giving aid. Classic perspectives in International Relations find political or commercial motives, and some suggest a humanitarian cause, while others attribute such giving to a hybridity model. On the other hand, middle power discourse focuses on social identification in international society. One less-discussed facet is domestic corruption and crony relationships within emerging donors. Korea offers a case in point as to the lack of institutional transparency which undermines efficacy and trust in the aid industry of the nation. It has little or no history of transparent governance and a shorter history as a donor. Amid the sense of growing competition in Asia over Africa and self-identification as middle power country with an experience of fast economic growth, the Korean government increased the level of development cooperation with Africa, backed by supportive national sentiment since the 1990s. The lack of experience as a donor and the self-enriching motives by the president's inner circles, however, limit Korea's long-term development cooperation with Africa. This paper examines the 'Korea Aid' project taking place in three African countries in 2016, and argues that the development project driven by the self-enriching motive resulted in groundless development projects with no consideration of local circumstances in Africa and turned taxpayers in Korea sceptical to international development cooperation. In the process, Africa becomes a landfill to dump ill-designed development projects the real benefit of which was drained by the inner circles of the emerging donor.