Jelena Vidojević, Co-Founder and Head of South-South Dialogues Program at NSI, and Mandira Bagwandeen, Affiliate Researcher in the South-South Dialogues Program, have published a new analysis on Brave New Europe examining the AU-EU relationship following the November 2025 summit in Luanda, Angola.

Their piece argues that the recent AU-EU Summit exemplified Europe’s persistent contradictions in engaging with Africa—framing the relationship as a “partnership of equals” while maintaining a security-first approach that serves European interests over African development priorities. The authors contend that the EU’s conditional development model, focused on governance requirements and regulatory alignment, increasingly contrasts with the tangible infrastructure investments offered by Eastern partners, particularly China.

Bagwandeen and Vidojević document how several African nations—including Zimbabwe, Sudan, Kenya, Nigeria, and Ethiopia—have already implemented pragmatic ‘Look East’ policies to secure the capital and expertise needed for structural economic transformation. They argue that these strategic pivots represent a fundamental critique of Western development frameworks and signal Africa’s preference for partners who prioritise concrete economic outcomes over ideological conditionalities.

Read the full analysis on Brave New Europe.

Brave New Europe has previously featured NSI content, including republishing interviews from NSI’s ‘Missing Voices: Critical Thinking in Times of Polycrisis’ project—notably Vidojević’s conversation with Sergey Karaganov—as well as other opinion pieces from NSI researchers examining the post-Western global order and contemporary geopolitical shifts.