This panel invites papers that critically examine China’s expanding roles in African development and security—from finance, infrastructure, and extractive investments to peacekeeping, mediation, private security, arms transfers, policing partnerships, and emerging “stability” agendas. Moving beyond celebratory or alarmist framings, the panel asks what China’s involvement does in practice: how it is negotiated, implemented, and contested across different African political orders, and how it reshapes (or reproduces) established logics of intervention, sovereignty, and political economy.
We welcome contributions that explore the relationships—tensions as well as synergies—between development initiatives and security outcomes. Papers might analyze how Chinese projects intersect with conflict dynamics, state-building agendas, regime survival strategies, or local legitimacy; how Chinese actors operate within (or alongside) multilateral institutions such as the UN and AU; and how Chinese practices compare with, adapt to, or diverge from Euro-American and post–Cold War intervention frameworks. The panel is especially interested in research that foregrounds African agency: how governments, communities, civil society, and armed actors engage Chinese actors and resources for their own projects, and how these engagements generate new forms of accountability, exclusion, and political contestation.
Possible themes include (but are not limited to): “developmental peace” and the politics of stability; oil, minerals, and security governance; peacekeeping, mandate politics, and operational adaptation; mediation and diplomacy across conflict parties; Belt and Road corridors and securitization; security for infrastructure and expatriate communities; private security and policing partnerships; data, surveillance, and digital infrastructure; and everyday experiences of China-linked development and security.
The panel welcomes interdisciplinary approaches across African Studies, IR, political economy, anthropology, geography, and security studies, and a range of methods including ethnography, interviews, archival work, and mixed-methods comparative research. Empirically, we encourage papers spanning different regions and sectors, including comparative work across cases.
Keywords: China–Africa; development; peacekeeping; mediation; sovereignty; political economy; infrastructure; security governance; multilateralism; African agency.
Please reach out to Felix Brender (f.brender@lse.ac.uk) with an abstract by 10 March at the very latest.
I look forward to your contributions!
