Book review: Carmody, Pádraig. 2011. The New Scramble for Africa. Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity Press.

 What explains China’s decision to send navy warships to the coast of Somalia to participate in a multi-country military effort to minimize piracy? To date, China’s formal, multilateral peacekeeping operations in sub-Saharan Africa have been in noncombat-related support positions and have been hugely disproportionate to the size of its military and to the contributions that countries like Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh have made. At a time when China’s international cooperation with Western countries on security and environmental issues is unusual or fraught, its participation in a multi-country military patrol of the Gulf of Aden seems anomalous