Japan's Foreign Aid to Africa: Angola and Mozambique within the TICAD Process.

• Author: Goto, Takuya
• Position: Book review

Japan's Foreign Aid to Africa

Angola and Mozambique within the TICAD Process

By Pedro Amakasu Raposo

London: Routledge, 2014, 256 pages, ISBN 9780415821568.

Pedro Amakasu Raposo's Japans Foreign Aid to Africa was published exactly at the right time when this subject is receiving remarkable attention not only from inside but also outside Japan. On January 2014, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited Ethiopia, Cote d'Ivoire and Mozambique with the Japanese private companies' delegation. This visit marked the new era of Japan's foreign policy towards Africa, as discussed later in this review.

While the Raposo's book subtitle is "Angola and Mozambique within the TICAD Process," it provides the readers with a comprehensive commentary and analysis of Japan's foreign aid policy to Africa during and after the Cold War. The book is divided into four parts with seven chapters. Part 1, Chapter 1 introduces why this book focused on TICAD (Tokyo International Conference on African Development), which has been held every 5 years since 1993. In essence, after the Cold War, the Japanese government shifted its foreign aid policy to Africa from reactive to pro-active, which is observable through the TICAD Process. One of the significant contributions of this book is that by combining the TICAD process and the aid policy to Africa it "establishes the research framework to examine multiple rationales behind Japan's bilateral aid decisions."

In Part 2 "Approach to Africa and IR Theories," based on scholarly literature, the author reviews analytical approaches (commercial and strategic-political approaches, etc.) (Chapter 2) and the theoretical perspectives within an International Relations framework (realism, liberalism, constructivism, etc.) (Chapter 3) to understand the purposes of Japan's foreign aid to Africa. It is argued that during the Cold War it was easy to identify an approach or framework best explaining Japan's aid rationale to Africa, however after the Cold War it became more difficult to do so. This is because TICAD introduced the concept of human security and consolidation of peace in Japan's African policy. As a result, Japan's policy after the Cold War is a combination of different approaches and perspectives.

Part3 "The TICAD Process" is composed of Chapter 4 and Chapter 5. Chapter 4 traces the history of Japan's foreign aid to Africa and examines the political implications of the TICAD process. The author argues that although the external...