An interview with Samir Amin

Samir Amin was a contributor to the first issue of Review of African Political Economy (Amin 1974). He is a militant Marxist economist who has published more than 30 books including the pathbreaking Imperialism and unequal development (1976) and Accumulation on a world scale (1974). He is an activist whose scholarship and commitment to Africa and the global South is extensive and deep. He has for more than 30 years been Director of Third World Forum, Dakar and has recently published Global history: a view from the South (2010). Samir Amin has argued that the challenges which Africa is facing today should be put in the longer time frame of the continuous construction by the imperialist centres of an asymmetric dominating and dominated relationship with the peripheries of the three continents. In that respect, the contemporary new stage of imperialist monopoly capital sees Africa almost exclusively as a source of natural resources to be plundered. He was in conversation with Ray Bush in July this year.