Short Abstract

Using “African Prisms”, this panel examines how African actors negotiate, adapt and resist Chinese military engagement across training, arms transfers, defence diplomacy and peace operations. It foregrounds African agency and the diverse, sometimes contradictory outcomes of security cooperation.

Long Abstract

China–Africa military cooperation is often portrayed through a singular geopolitical lens: either as evidence of Beijing's expanding strategic influence or as an African response to declining Western engagement. This panel uses the conference theme of "African Prisms" to disaggregate these narratives and examine how military cooperation is interpreted, negotiated and reshaped across different African contexts. The panel asks how African governments, armed forces, non-state actors and regional institutions engage with China as a security partner, and how their interests, institutional cultures, and political constraints shape the form and consequences of this cooperation. Rather than treating "Africa" or "China" as unitary actors, the papers explore variation across countries, institutions and fields of practice, including military education, training, arms transfers, defence diplomacy, PSO and capacity-building. The panel examines the relationship between formal policy narratives and cooperation in practice. Bringing together perspectives from African studies, security studies, military sociology, and IR, the panel examines three interconnected questions: What forms of agency do African actors exercise when selecting, combining, or resisting external security partnerships? How does Chinese military engagement interact with established bilateral, Western and multilateral arrangements? Whose concepts, evidence and categories frame scholarly and policy understandings of these relationships? The panel argues that China–Africa military cooperation is best understood not as a coherent geopolitical project but as a refracted field of encounters that produces distinct and sometimes contradictory outcomes at different levels. This prism-based approach makes African priorities, institutional choices, and knowledge production central to analysing the changing architecture of security cooperation.

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