Africa’s Structural Weakening

About the book

Synopsis

Why has Africa, despite abundant natural resources, young populations, and decades of development intervention, remained the world’s poorest continent? Conventional explanations point to governance failures, corruption, and weak institutions — but Africa’s Structural Weakening asks what if these are symptoms rather than causes, and what if the continent’s challenges stem not from internal deficiencies but from historically entrenched power relations that systematically constrain sovereignty.

Physician and development scholar Ben Adarkwa Dwamena offers a synthesis of dependency theory, postcolonial analysis, and critical development studies to reveal the mechanisms by which African weakness has been produced and reproduced — from colonial extraction and the destabilization of pan-African leaders to debt and aid conditionality, narrative power, and security dependence — and weighs the promises and tensions of the African Union’s Agenda 2063, closing with strategic pathways toward genuine structural renewal.