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Hello and welcome back again for this China in Africa debate.

I'm really happy to be here for this conversation.

It's been a while since we had those talk where I had a guest to talk about different issues about China Africa relationship.

And today I'm having another guest that was already here with us before talking about China relationship, military, China security in Africa.

I'm having Paul Nantulia with me.

Good afternoon to you, Paul, because I know that you're in the same part of the world today.

How are you?

I'm doing great.

I'm doing great in the city of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

And I'm very happy to be on the show.

I think I've been on this show.

I'm losing count.

I'm losing count.

Yes, exactly.

Oh, I guess that's the big thing.

It's a good thing in a space where we are seeing more and more the China Africa space kind of shrinking.

And now when we have people like you keep on producing good content and good analysis, it's really for us an opportunity to have you to say, you know what, let's talk more.

Because as much as that space is shrinking, but the China Africa space is still expanding, especially when you look into how China is engaging with Africa, how China has changed its engagement with Africa.

We see that that space keeps on growing.

But somehow on the policymaker side, on the academic side, we don't really seem to pay attention on how those changes are happening and what represent for us in terms of opportunity.

Talking about those changes, we're going to talk about one important one, talking about the Global Security Initiative, the GSI.

For those who don't know, it's among one of the three big China initiatives that China has put up since the last three, four years already.

We have the Global Development Initiative, the Global Civilization Initiative, and the Global Security Initiative.

Those initiatives are becoming China's foreign affairs pillar in how they engage countries in the Global South and also in the rest of the world.

It's really to what the way China is looking, how the international system is changing and what kind of value it tends to put on the table.

And today, when we talk about the Global Security Initiative, who better to talk about it with than Paul Nantwila when it comes to how GSI is taking place in Africa?

I'm having Paul today for this conversation because Paul has wrote extensively about the Security Initiative, but he recently wrote a paper that's called Africa as a testing ground for China's Global Security Initiative.

We know that during the last FOCAC, China and Africa signed a lot of agreements.

In the FOCAC agreement, we had a lot of elements related to security, military cooperation, and we also saw the Global Security Initiative being mentioned in the FOCAC final agreement.

So what does it mean exactly?

What does the GSI mean for Africa?

What's the value system of the GSI?

Do we see ourselves into the GSI?

How do we approach GSI?

How is China implementing GSI?

All of those questions are going to be part of this conversation I'm going to have with Paul for the next 30 minutes or so, hoping that I keep it on time so people kind of understand better how China is evolving in Africa.

So Paul, back to you, Global Security Initiative.

Before diving into what does it mean for Africa, let's look into the Global Security Initiative itself.

What does it tell us about China's security vision and perspective on international system?

Yes, Noel, thank you very much.

So the Global Security Initiative is one of three Chinese strategic concepts that speak to China's global ambitions and China's global role, basically how China sees itself in the world.

The other two initiatives are the Global Development Initiative, which is basically an effort by China to ramp up or increase its international development assistance, which has expanded quite significantly over the past two to three years.

And then you have the Global Civilization Initiative, which is an effort by China to establish affinities with different countries and different organizations around the world that can advance a Chinese discourse on international problems ranging from non-proliferation to peacekeeping operations, peace enforcement operations to governance, you know, and that sort of thing.

So these are what you might call triplet initiatives.

The Global Security Initiative is the security component of that.

It's a security component of that, and it is an effort by China to craft a narrative and language and discourse around pressing international problems, problems of peace and security, problems of things like terrorism and counterterrorism, right, transnational threats.

China perceives itself to be a returning global power.

And what do global powers do?

Global powers shape international discourse around security and things like that.

So China has ascribed for itself that kind of role to be able to craft narratives and discourse, right?

This is the reason why under the Global Security Initiative, there are quite a number of high-level security platforms that China has put together, right, as alternative venues for countries and organizations to discuss global problems, right?

But as I point out, as we point out in this study, the Global Security Initiative is also much more than just that.

So there are a number of initiatives, you know, the Xinjiang Forum, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization on Defense and the forums that are done by the People's Liberation Army, by the National Defense University and so on.

But it's much more than that.

It has to be read together with the 2025 Chinese National Security Paper.

Yes, and previous Chinese national security documents, which are basically framed around domestic stability, domestic stability meaning regime stability, meaning the stability of the ruling party, which is effectively the backbone of China's governance, right?

That without the stability of the ruling party, actually, this is what the national security document states, without the security of the ruling party, then everything goes awry, right?

There's basically nothing there.

So the Global Security Initiative is the external facing element of China's national security concept, which derives first and foremost from regime security and stability.

But then, of course, there are also other elements.

There are other elements in play in there, many of which are shared by a number of governments around the world, especially in the Global South, in the Central Asian states, in South Asia, in Latin America, and then, of course, on the African continent.

But then there are also elements of the Global Security Initiative that seem very innocuous, you know, things like consultation, things like respect for legitimate security interest.

But when you unpack what is meant by a legitimate security interest, it could cover everything from the stability of the regime to territorial claims and things of that nature.

So we've seen African countries, for instance...

Excuse me, allow me to interrupt you there.

I think this is where you mentioned in your paper the notion of indivisibility of security, the notion that China put indivisibility of security in a sense where one nation on one group of nations cannot think of their own security issue at the expense of other stakeholders' legitimate concern.

I think that's right, right?

Absolutely.

And so in that sense, we have seen China supporting individual African countries, you know, if they've got claims of that nature, right, they can attempt to get support from the People's Republic of China.

But in exchange, those countries also lend support to China, for instance, around Tibet, around Xinjiang, around the Hong Kong national security law and around Taiwan, where we have seen African countries and African diplomats actually register the support of their governments for Chinese positions on those issues, right?

So the concept of legitimate security interest is something that needs to be, you know, effectively, you know, when you unpack it is when you begin to understand the substance of what the People's Republic of China is trying to do with a global security initiative.

The other element with the global security initiative, as we mentioned earlier, is that it is heavily focused on the domestic aspect of security, right?

So when you look at the security capacity building and training that has been conducted under the GSI brand, it all tends to revolve around law enforcement, police, things like intelligence, paramilitary work, coast guards, right, coast guard actions and things of that nature.

It's more focused on that, at least in terms of the countries that have been through this kind of training than it is on the purely military to military work that the People's Liberation Army conducts with African countries, which includes professional military education.

The GSI appears to be much more focused on the domestic side of things.

Now, when you look at the domestic side of Chinese security, which, of course, is built around regime security, the Chinese call it Weiwen, you'll find that many African political systems share similar perspectives on regime security and survival.

So when you look at, for instance, you look at how countries organise their police forces, right, you know, a police is a force.

In fact, I mentioned it, you know, a police is a force.

You look at the ranks of police officers, their military ranks, right, lieutenant generals, things of that nature.

Secondly, you know, the police is not just limited to internal law and order.

It is essentially, it operates almost like a military, right?

So when you look at that on the African continent, when you look at that, you know, with African policing systems, which are highly centralised, where, for instance, in some countries, the police is under executive control within the president's office, right, you look at the People's Armed Police in China, it operates under very similar institutional characteristics, very, very similar characteristics.

So when you have the People's Armed Police meeting and engaging within the Global Security Initiative architecture with African policing organisations, you'll find that they speak a common language based on similar characteristics.

So that's one of the elements of GSI engagement.

Before dwelling into that part, let's go back a bit.

You've mentioned so many interesting things that I think that are going to resonate a lot among our audience to try to understand how the GSI came about in the context of the African continent.

You mentioned how GSI focus, it's an outside first fronting of China internal security, security challenge visions and all of that.

And you mentioned so many things.

I'm really trying to catch up the doors I'm going to take, that we're not going to take us into a rabbit hole where we're going to go into so many things because there are so many implications to what you've said.

In the context of Africa, you've mentioned the characteristics, you've mentioned how there is some similarities on that.

So here I'm speaking to your experience.

When you look around the continent, when you look at the type of engagement we've seen since the last couple of years, three, four years already with the military exercise and the exchanges out of the FOCAC, we had the promises of training African military and police services and all of that.

I think we talked about 5,000, I think I got the number wrong, but we got a thousand numbers in terms of people being trained.

When you talk with your colleagues in Africa, when you talk about people in the security forces in Africa, do you get the sense that first of all, they understand China's vision of GSI, they understand what it is.

And second of all, they share the same type of concern about GSI, or you have the sense that it's more of like, you know what, we see there are some aspects into the GSI that are useful for us in terms of regime security, regime stability, and we're going to only tap into that without really aligning ourselves behind that vision.

What kind of perception that you get from African stakeholders when it comes to GSI?

You know, that's a great question because it's actually a bit of all the things that you've mentioned.

For some countries, for very, very specific reasons, some countries will invest or are investing in the actual concept itself, in terms of what the actual concept offers and the space that the concept, because it's a broad, it's an umbrella concept, it's a catch-all concept.

You know, when you look at it on the surface, it's very difficult to disagree with the terminology and so on.

So the terminology, you know, there was very, very deliberate.

Theoretically, it's good.

Yeah, yeah.

Yes.

You know, when you look at it and it's like, how can you disagree with it?

How can you disagree, for instance, with defending the United Nations Charter?

You know, things of that nature.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So some African countries will invest in the actual concept and also in terms of how they can shape that concept to suit their own domestic, their own domestic situation and their own domestic narrative.

Right.

So that will happen not with the whole country, but with a few countries that happen to share that perspective.

Then with other countries, it will mostly be very, very practical, you know, in terms of here is a security program that guarantees access to security hardware, policing system, surveillance systems, digital surveillance systems and things of that kind, which can be delivered speedily, which is more affordable than what they can get, for instance, from Israel or from India or from other countries that specialize in this type of equipment.

And it's flexible, flexible financing.

Yeah.

So for many African countries, in fact, I would say for the vast majority of African countries, it's about a new security package on the scene that affords them this opportunity of having access to this equipment on flexible terms, on cheaper terms and which can be delivered quickly to augment whatever it is that they're trying to do internally.

I mean, Burkina Faso the other day secured a package that everybody is talking about in the media.

Right.

So for many African countries, right, that is the primary motivation.

That's the primary motivation.

Then for other countries looking for infrastructure finance, looking for finance in terms of energy, looking for equity investment, aligning or embracing or being seen to embrace or agree with the GSI, which is a concept that China is investing very, very heavily in modeling and promoting, associating with that concept provides access to those non -security goods, non-security programs like loans, like infrastructure, like energy and so on.

So African countries are also trying to play this to their advantage in an environment, frankly, where you now have resource constraints, that you have international resource constraints.

Right.

So because China has been there and China has shown some willingness at least to invest in these sorts of sectors, one way of getting access to that is to align or embrace the GSI without necessarily digesting it.

Exactly.

That's quite an opportunistic perspective on that.

It's very opportunistic because a lot of the time we tend to look at China as a strategic, powerful, opportunistic actor in Africa, but we tend to miss the African side of it.

African countries are also highly opportunistic in the ways in which they engage.

I mean, that's the vision I had.

Yes.

The vision of African countries don't really care about what's going on in the South China Sea, for instance, by showing support for Chinese positions on those kind of issues.

A Chinese diplomat and the Chinese leader is not going to forget that country X voted registered support for China's South China Sea claims.

So if they come along with a funding request for a particular project, then the chances are, you know, the Chinese will be amenable.

So the African countries are also trying to play that diplomatic game.

And I got that feeling quite often when I look into African engagement to China.

And I realized that when you read different FOCACS resolutions, you get the feeling that African countries are just signing a piece of paper without really committing to what those agreements are about, what those resolutions are about.

And you really have that sense of opportunistic in the sense where you say, we are ready to send whatever document they're going to put in front of us as long as it guarantees us to have access to financing, to things that we need for our own development.

But we don't really subscribe to that.

That's another conversation.

But I'm going to make another video on that.

But based on that opportunistic view, we have those two different views, the opportunistic one, those really in those who are really embracing it and those who are really, you know, touch and go and observing what is it about.

What is China's perspective on that when it comes to the GSI being implemented in Africa?

Do you have the sense that China wants Africans to embrace it fully with the with them, with the mouth and with their heart in terms of like having that transfer of values in terms of what security is, or do you have the sense that China will also be somehow content with the fact that some of them are just embracing it for, you know, for the show, for the media without really aligning with that vision?

What's your sense of that?

You know, the more I study China and China-Africa relations, the more I take away.

The image of a fisherman, so think of China as a fisherman.

Right.

You are in your canoe, you are out there on the river and you're trying to catch as many fish as you can.

Right.

So you're going to you're going to cast your net wide and you're going to sit on your boat and you might throw some incentives, you know, some worms here and there.

OK, some breadcrumbs, you know, and then maybe after about five hours, you're going to haul your catch and you're going to hope that in that catch, you're going to get a particular fish, a particular type of fish or a particular breed of fish that will get you the most the most money.

Yeah.

Right.

This is how I tend to think about China.

So when you think about the GSI, it is it's basically it's a, you know, China is casting its net as widely as possible.

And you can see that in terms of the articulation of the six GSI principles and the 26 GSI pillars designed to be as broad as possible.

If you can get those that can embrace it conceptually and invest in it, well and good.

If you can get those that will align with it in order to secure policing equipment, military equipment and so on, well and good, because they are going to register that in a bilateral document.

So if you look at all the bilateral documents that African countries have signed with China over the last two years, all of them have a clause on the GSI.

All of them have a clause on the GSI.

China can then go to the international level and say, look, we have 50 countries.

Now we have 60 countries.

Now we have 70 countries all adhering to us.

Exactly.

That exactly.

This is similar to what was done with the Belt and Road process.

So if you can get those, then well and good.

If you can get the opportunistic actors who basically are going to give you endorsement in exchange for infrastructure or energy, that is also good enough.

Exactly.

So you'll be content with that.

Yes.

So you have the very good, you have the good and you have the good enough.

What all of them do is they give you endorsements that is reflected either in multilateral documents like FOCAC documents, or bilateral documents that are signed between China and individual countries.

So China is basically the fisherman that is casting the net as wide as possible.

And this is typical of Chinese diplomatic behavior.

The norms always begin broad and then they go down to the specific.

And it's very, very typical.

It's very, very typical.

But I also think they are learning, and I think I'm going to go out on a limb here.

They are learning from, for instance, the proliferation security initiative of the United States, which came up during the second Bush administration in 2003, which again, it did not have a secretariat.

It is not a formal organization.

It's very informal and countries sign onto it to give it legitimacy.

And then from that point, you then move to the specific, where countries that signed onto the proliferation security initiative agreed to certain things, interdicting suspected weapons of, you know, suspected material that could support weapons of mass destruction and so on.

And then they moved to the specific.

I have a feeling, I have a feeling that Chinese diplomats looked at this concept and perhaps this is where it will go.

However, for now, it is still very broad, but the speed at which it is being concretized should also be noted because now you have trainings, you have programs, you have, you know, we had African officers just in July that were being in Beijing for, I think, I think 30 of them will spend a few days here in China.

GSI mainstreaming and GSI integration into the African peace and security architecture, the China-Africa peace and security architecture was one of the topics that was discussed in that.

Right.

So now you see GSI being mainstreamed.

However, it's not just occurring in FOCAC, as we point out in this study, it's also occurring in those parallel regional institutions like the China CILAC, which is for the Caribbean and Latin American.

It's also Middle East, China, South China, Middle East Forum, China Arab States Forum and so on.

So, you know, there's that.

Effort, there's that effort to kind of to kind of mainstream it, but again, to keep it broad so as to eliminate potential pushback, disagreements and so on, and to try as much as possible to align it with what countries can do with agreeable issues.

No African country will disagree with the idea that the United Nations needs to be defended and that the United Nations structure needs to be protected.

No African country will disagree with that.

Right.

So you're building, you're building affinities in that sense.

Few questions before we wrap up this, this conversation.

Few example, when you look into the GSI, how is it implemented in Africa?

On your paper, you mentioned a few of them.

How can, what kind of thing our audience should be looking into when they say, when they want to recognize GSI implementation in Africa, how GSI in Africa looks like?

OK, one is to look at the agreements.

So whenever African countries are signing agreements with the People's Republic of China, that's one way to know about GSI.

I mean, some of these, like if you look at documents that Algeria has signed with with China, you know, Algeria is very, very systematic in terms of its engagement with China.

A lot of military exercise.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And it's, it's clearly spelled out.

You know, you look at Egypt as well.

Very, very clearly spelled out.

So that's one, that's one way to look at it.

The other thing to look out for are the, the joint mechanisms on law enforcement.

That China is establishing with African countries.

So if you look at the Ethiopia, the China, the Ministry of Public Security and the Ethiopian counterpart, which is the Ministry of Policing, signed a collaboration, an agreement, right, that provides for the protection of Belt and Road assets in the country and so on.

That's the other way to look at it.

A lot of the times the Chinese media is going to publish these things because the Chinese media also wants to show that, you know, this initiative is growing.

The third area to look out for are physical institutions.

So institutions, training institutions.

So there's an agreement, for instance, with Ghana to build a police, a China, China, Ghana police, policing institution, a policing school.

And a lot of these things are modeled after similar institutions that the People's Republic of China has built in other regions through similar parallel institutions as FOCA.

So I think that's the third element.

The fourth element, which is also very important, is the actual training.

So China will always release a statement at the end of a training program.

For instance, there's a program in Somalia that, you know, that we mentioned in this report, which was conducted under the GSI framework.

And they will tell you what was covered over that program, the number of officers that were trained in that program, and they will explain how the GSI is mainstreamed into that.

And then that story will then be carried by the Somali press and by other and by other African media organizations.

So these are the four items to look out for in terms of GSI implementation and the manifestation of the GSI concept.

But it's going to be different in each country.

Yeah, it's going to be different.

Right.

So in Ethiopia, it will be very different from Uganda.

You know, for instance, Uganda has an arrangement where the UPDF deploys to protect, for instance, the Chinese industrial parks in the country and so on.

And they had a police exercise, the common police exercise a few years back.

Yes, they had a common policing exercise and so on.

In countries like Lesotho, you have a structure, it's an informal structure, but it addresses law enforcement and that then affords the Lesotho police access to forensic, forensic equipment training in China, in Chinese police academies and so on.

Rwanda has a very, very close relationship with the Shandong Police Department, which trains the Rwanda police and so on.

So it's going to look different in each of these in each of these elements.

But these are the four the four areas.

These are the four areas to look at.

When I look at those four areas, there's something that comes into my mind, value setting, new value setting, new value shaping.

Do we see a kind of value transfer that's happening during those trainings?

Do we see a kind of like, I know that I've mentioned it before, but do we see a kind of like a transfer of value of during those moments?

We just remain very into the, you know, up a high level of materialistic engagement.

Potentially, but not always.

Look at a country like Kenya.

Kenya has a very tight, very close relationship, for instance, with the PLA.

And it's landed in hot trouble in Washington DC these days.

Yes, yes.

And it also has this program to train 400 police every year, you know, from the General Service Unit, from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations and so on.

So they have, they have, they have this relationship.

But the Kenyan security sector, especially the military, has always retained its apolitical character.

It does not intervene in politics.

It's not controlled by any political party and so on.

So, you know, all this training that the Kenyan security actors are doing with China is not necessarily changing Kenya's values when it comes to, for instance, the management of the security sector.

Now, in other countries, you know, you might have something very, very similar.

Uganda, for instance, has political commissars within a structure.

Even the police, they have political commissars.

In Angola, Mozambique, you have a political commissar system, but which operates quite differently.

That's what I was about to mention.

The fact that when you look into a country where the police force and the military force remain apolitical, far away from military, for political influence, those kind of trainings can really work and really empower countries, security forces to become force of good, force of stability, improving their techniques and having access to weapons and all of that.

But in countries where you do have a strong political influence within the military services, within the police services, don't you feel there is a kind of fear that people should have in terms of the kind of value that those services can take from those GSI in a sense where they say, you know, China share the values of regime stability, regime security and all of that.

There is that sense that maybe they might be empowering bad governance in a context where we still have a lot of young African calling for democracy and much more apolitical security forces.

Because, side note, since you mentioned Kenya, if Kenya was really, if in Kenya, the police and army was really politicized, we wouldn't be able to see what we've saw since last year and since a few weeks ago, the youth on the street trying to protest and all of that.

In other countries they've tried and we saw how the police and army reacted in a sense where, because they are highly politicized, they're really going against the protesters.

So those are the kind of worriness that people may have looking into those kind of influence of China in GSI.

Yes, an argument can be made that in Kenya, you know, the police is more politicized, the police, the paramilitary, the GSU and so on.

But the military still, you're not seeing the military on the streets.

Yeah.

And even in the 2007 and 2008 post -election violence, I was in Kenya at the time, it was a very frightening experience.

The military did not deploy.

In fact, there were some regional leaders that were wondering, why isn't the military stepping in?

But the military did not step in.

And the military, you never see it, right?

So still, you know, there's still that element.

However, however, there is a school of thought among African China experts that is sounding a note of alarm and caution that the uptick of these values, especially the principle of party control over national security work.

And I'm quoting directly from a Chinese document, party control of national security is that the uptick of that, it could be potentially promoted, especially among those countries that share this notion of the management of security services, countries where politicization is basically normalized, you know, where the police works at the behest of the regime, you know, the way when, is also existing in these African countries.

And they will look for validation from a partner, right?

Like the People's Armed Police, who comes from a similar tradition, who will basically strengthen that, right?

So there is a school of thought, quite a number.

In fact, some are quoted in this report who are sounding a note of caution that this could be highly dangerous for Africa.

And secondly, you know, I mean, as the report also mentions, Africa is coming out of a very tragic and painful history of dictatorial one party rule.

And young Africans do not want to go to that.

They don't want to dive into that, because when you look at Afrobarometer reports, upwards of 70 percent of Africans do not support one party rule.

Eighty percent do not support military rule, right?

So they want to live in an environment where the security services are accountable to a higher authority, accountable to civilian authority, to civilian rule.

These concepts are antithetical to a concept that basically imposes party rule, absolute party control over the security services.

So that's what you say is a serious concern.

Yeah, those concerns are really shared by many on the continent, by civil society, by stakeholders that are trying to understand how the future of China's security engagement in Africa looks like.

There are so many things that we could talk about.

I was really thinking of talking about China and divisibility into the security in the context of, for example, the DRC Rwanda situation, how China would look like in a case like this.

I won't touch on that because if I touch on that, we're going to go over our time.

We are already over time.

But Paul, it was really a pleasure to have you on this conversation.

And I'm going to remind the title of your paper again, Africa as a testing ground for China's global security initiative.

It's a very interesting paper to read.

It's going to provide you a lot of perspective on China's security engagement in Africa.

Paul has written extensively on China, Africa engagement, and there is a lot, a lot to learn.

We're going to put this paper, the paper link and reference on the show.

Not so you can see what is it about.

And you're going to also see, you're also going to see all the content that Paul has produced on that issue.

We've seen a lot of things happening on China, Africa relationship in terms of security these days.

We are seeing the expansion of Norinco.

Norinco is really now selling weapons, left and right and center agreement being signed, you know, Chinese drone being bought, Chinese jet fighters being brought and all of that.

Chinese helicopters still being considered being bought despite having some accident happening here and there.

But China is really expanding its security military footprint on the continent, and it's going to be really interesting to see how it's going to look like and how it's going to shape Africa political stability and have Africa long -term security view of itself and of the international system.

So I'm going to stop here and keep in touch and see you next time.

The discussion continues online.

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