The introduction previews the argument that developing countries can use borrowing relationships to their advantage. It situates this argument about the financial statecraft of borrowers within the literature on sovereign debt, foreign aid, and African politics. It explains the specific focus on sub-Saharan Africa by outlining three dynamics that enabled African governments to diversify their portfolios of external finance in the early twenty-first century: debt relief, Chinese lending, and liquidity in international bond markets. The chapter describes the book's mixed-methods research design, combining statistical analysis of the terms of aid agreements with three case studies of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Ghana. Finally, the chapter highlights how the financial statecraft of borrowers contributes to debates on financial interdependence, multipolarity, and the agency of developing countries.

We review the role the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has played over the past several decades in managing financial crises and suggest possible areas for reform. We examine the background to the 2008–2009 global financial crisis and analyze many of its implications, particularly the sharp increase in the burden of public debt that was a consequence of the crisis, and identify this as a source of systemic risk. We argue that our current financial system has a number of vulnerabilities that pose a major threat to financial stability and economic prosperity and could, in a crisis, interact in highly destabilizing ways with other aspects of our governance system. The UN Charter clearly introduced the concept of economic and social development as a key responsibility of the international community, and two of the leading UN agencies, the IMF and the World Bank, are very much at the center of implementing the UN’s mandate in this area. We focus on the IMF because of the central role the organization plays in the management of the global monetary system, a system whose weaknesses were dramatically revealed during the 2008–2009 financial crisis. We present several proposals for reforms aimed at improving the global financial architecture.