African agency in geopolitical times: playing with EU and Chinese ontological security

In 2021 the European Union (EU) launched Global Gateway (GG). This new €300 billion European strategy is intended to boost the EU’s involvement in areas such as transport infrastructure, green energy, and digitalisation in developing countries. The African continent is expected to benefit with half of the expected figures. Much of the debate in the past few years has attempted to dissect the (geo)political, financial and economic dimensions of GG from the perspective of Brussels and EU Member States’ policymakers. However, very little has been discussed on how African policymakers have perceived GG. This paper will thus focus on African agency in the context of GG and the broader framework of Africa–EU relations. Moreover, it will compare this agency with that which has been displayed in the past decade of relations between Africa and China. Drawing on an ontological security analytical framework, the paper seeks to understand the new dynamics and contestations of African agency in the continent’s relations with the EU and China that have been ignored in both mainstream and critical approaches to EU foreign policy studies.