During the last few years, Mikhail Gorbachev's new thinking has stimulated a number of dramatic and largely unexpected shifts in Soviet foreign policy. In Southern Africa, its effects have been both immediate and quite profound. The two most publicised changes have been Moscow's growing support for negotiations as a method of resolving the region's conflicts, and the related reduction of its commitments to the régimes in Angola and Mozambique. In fact, there is evidence that the Kremlin has been putting pressure on both its allies to engage in a process of ‘national reconciliation’ with the armed movements trying to overthrow them. At the rhetorical level, at least, there has also been a marked decline in Moscow's enthusiasm for revolutionary upheavals in Southern Africa.

The year 1989 will in future generations be known as the annus mirabilis, not only as far as developments in Eastern Europe are concerned, but also within the context of South African politics. The September general elections for the tricameral Parliament marked a turning point in the direction of governmental policies. Nowhere has the changing mood been more clearly demonstrated than in the streets of the cities and towns. A countrywide spate of protest marches has occurred since the historic first government-approved peaceful anti-apartheid march in Cape Town on 13 September 1989, and these have become the most visible symptom of the advance to the so-called ‘new South Africa’.

Recent developments on the South African political scene have raised some hopes about bringing an end to the war in Mozambique. The change of direction initiated by President F. W. de Klerk, the unbanning of the African National Congress (A.N.C.) and other previously prohibited organisations, and the progress made towards negotiations have pointed to a possible change of heart by the Government, and a relaxation of its previously hostile regional policy. There can be little doubt, given Pretoria's rôle in the whole area, and the history of its involvement in the Mozambican crisis, that changes within South Africa will be felt beyond its borders. However, it would be unwise to ignore the part played by internal factors in explaining the growth in both the scale and severity of the conflict in Mozambique over the past decade.

In this increasingly bloc-competitive world, small countries are generally overlooked. Unless, by dint of fortune, they have some strategic resource, or have leaders who are globally vocal and visible, or are able to link themselves to the fortunes of larger political units, they may very well stand to be economically disadvantaged. Located in the drought-prone Sudano-Sahelian region of West Africa, with a land area that spans only 4,361 square miles (11,295 sq km) and a population currently estimated at about 797,000, The Gambia represents the classic case of a small country. It is surrounded on all sides by Senagal, except for its short Atlantic coastline, and extends 484 km inland, varying in width between 24 and 48 km along the River Gambia. Apart from being a geographical Lilliput, it has few natural resources and lacks the type of controversial leadership that commands world attention.

It is, no doubt, a journalistic cliché to assert that Côte d'Ivoire is ‘in crisis’. It is both undeniable and obvious that the world's largest cocoa producer, dependent for the majority of its foreign-exchange earnings and for the livelihood of the majority of its working population on the export of cocoa and coffee, is severely affected by the collapse in commodity prices which has occurred since 1980. With the exception of the false boomlet of 1986, cocoa prices have fallen throughout the decade, from a peak of £3,500 per ton in 1977 to the £670–750 range of the 1989–90 season. In real terms the dollar price of cocoa is now only 25 per cent of its 1977–8 value.

There is evidence of a new trend in recent scholarship on African political economy: an effort to tip the scale towards the latter end of the so-called state-society balance. This nascent movement portends to serve as a corrective to past academic work devoted to defining and delineating the form and nature of the African state. The statist literature has traditionally formed two camps, one based on liberal, neo-classical theory, and the other informed by the neo-Marxist dependencia model. No matter what the approach, in these studies the state is the central locus of macro-economic and political processes: as the centre of resource extraction and distribution, and the determinant of the nature of national politics, the state is fixated upon as the source of, and/or solution to, the economic status of African societies.