Africa can become a cyber power!

Power is a concept that has, over time, been the subject of much work and debate among philosophers, scientists, soldiers, and others. Let us first set aside the idea of power expressed as the capacity for motion described by the laws of physics, which lies outside the [geopolitical] framework in which our analysis unfolds.

Within this framework, the concept of power is generally associated with the notions of action, potential for action, and authority (from which it is nonetheless distinct). We can also note the preconceived idea that, for a country, power is necessarily measured by its ability to carry out significant actions and to bend other countries to its will by influencing them. This is a perception that limits the scope of the concept, and it also breaks with the vision of the Chinese master Sun Tzu, who in his famous treatise "The Art of War" teaches us that "by the word power one must not understand domination, but the faculty that allows one to turn into action everything one sets out to do."

Faced with this apparent contradiction, Jean-François Bianchi argues that "power is therefore not an absolute, but a very relative relationship—as much psychological and cognitive as material—to others. […] It is assessed in forces, hence in material as well as immaterial capacities, and is compared in balances of power, which predetermine a substantial part of the hoped-for effects."

Classically, a country's power flows through three essential channels: military power, which has always made it possible to assert a nation's interests; economic power, which is today the theatre of all confrontations between contemporary nations, with a consensus among geopolitics specialists that military war has given way to economic war, and armies transforming accordingly. These two channels of power constitute hard power, that is, the ability to impose one's will (through coercion, force) by bending that of others.

The third classic channel is cultural power (the concept of soft power developed by the American professor Joseph S. Nye), which uses language, cultures or religion as vectors to shape wills and consolidate one's international standing. Note that since 2004, the American diplomat Suzanne Nossel has theorised a new category of power called smart power, broadly understood as a synthesis and combination of hard power (the ability to coerce) and soft power (the ability to incentivise, to persuade).

The concept was indeed officially adopted as a new matrix of international relations by the American administration under Obama, clearly illustrated in a 2009 speech by Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State. It is to this new category that some specialists now assign economic warfare.

I. Africa's relationship to the notion of power

Contrary to the signs of weakness and powerlessness that today's Africa may appear to display, the concept of power is not foreign to its culture and its centuries-old history (particularly the part that has very often been obscured). Witness, for example, the increasingly abundant literature on the reigns of pharaohs such as Thutmose III or Ramesses II, who, we can see, already had a practical knowledge of classical power (military, economic and cultural alike).

Described by Egyptologists as warrior kings, they are now known to have been extraordinary conquerors in the service of restoring the Egyptian empire, which had been dismantled by invaders (the Hyksos) during the reigns of their predecessors. A rigorous analysis of their epics quickly reveals both their ambition for greatness, their military genius and their strategy of power, fuelled by the will to push back the invaders as far as possible and to consolidate the influence of pharaonic civilisation.