Shaping the Future of Power: Knowledge Production and Network-Building in China–Africa Relations is an important contribution to China scholarship and to China–Africa studies in particular. Its contribution may be particularly fundamental in the context of China's flagship Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). When Chinese President Xi Jinping launched the BRI in September 2013 with a speech in Kazakhstan, among the five areas of intended cooperation mentioned, one was strengthening people-to-people ties. Benabdallah's detailed and thoughtful study is a founding in-depth take on what “strengthening people-to-people ties” means in practical form and for international relations theory.

Into that, Benabdallah opens refreshingly: the catalyst of her research here was her own surprise at the scale and intensity of China–Africa people-to-people activities during fieldwork in each of China and Africa. This also points to the author's research methodology, which focused on intensive interview-based fieldwork in China and Africa within a broader international relations theory framework. For a topic applying to more than two billion people and more than fifty countries, the author's research approach and humility are a commendable starting point. This also means that the text is useful for scholars and development practitioners alike.

Benabdallah's take on China's apparent success in carving out a unique political economy space in Africa is built on an important structural underpinning. That is, the absence of “hierarchical othering” in knowledge production and network-building by China in dealings with Africa. In other words, in place of the traditional “vertical” North–South relations equivalent, China's approach to “relational power” is a “horizontal” one. She argues that the mechanical underpinnings of that “horizontal approach” lie in the way that China first positions itself as an equal developing country peer, and is then able to relatively invisibly lead in extending bilateral and regional forms of knowledge production and network building. As Benabdallah puts it: “China portrays itself as another developing country, as African states’ equal, and this – in my analysis – makes power relations less visible/confrontational and therefore more successful” (p. 16). Getting to grips with this unique and seemingly contradictory and less visible power dynamic, and how it itself shapes power, seems to sit at the heart of the aims of the study.

Shaping the Future of Power, as the title implies, specifically focuses on the artforms of the shaping. Three case studies of the platforms for shaping, whether training or technology transfer, are selected – military diplomacy and security trainings; public diplomacy and trainings for journalists; and cultural diplomacy and Confucius Institutes – to elaborate in detail what “shaping” means on the ground. Hence, this approach uniquely maps out the real world mechanics of China's idea for deeper “people-to-people” ties.

One point in the journalism case study, however, highlights a weakness of the overall elaboration. “However attractive and interesting this rhetoric is, it remains true that when we return to the context of China's presence in African media landscape, CGTN Africa is not a popular channel for Kenyans to get international news from and the rhetoric in its reporting can hardly explain its attractiveness to ordinary citizens” (pp. 107–108). To that end and at least in this iteration of her scholarship, Benabdallah offers no metrics on the power-related or other outcomes of China's intensive layers of knowledge production and network-building. The aim here, however, is limited to describing them, in international relations theory and the applied China–Africa context. Benabdallah does though call for future such research. Her own work, moreover, enables this in having provided the necessary scholarly foundations.

Additionally, a strength of the book may also be a weakness. It was noted, for example, that the Chinese Ministry of Commerce's Academy for International Business appears to offer disproportionately more short-term business training seminars to officials from Ghana, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya and Mauritius. The text proposes this might relate to the role of the English language, which Chinese educators are more adept at teaching in. Additional explanations, from an economics lens for example, may relate this to the relatively dynamic environments these countries present for Chinese investors, and China's broader economic agenda in the region (see, for instance, 2020 reports from the Africa Development Bank), and equivalently to economic demography and geography (for which, see my article “An economic demography explanation for China's ‘Maritime Silk Road’ interest in Indian Ocean countries,” Journal of the Indian Ocean Region, 15 [1], 2018). That is, where this study highlights that one should not understand China–Africa relations only through the study of aid, trade and investment, it yet also highlights the importance of these other lenses.

Benabdallah's work overall is a useful, relatively dense, direct entry point for people wanting to understand notions of China's emerging “soft power” in Africa, and the instruments used on a people-to-people level therein. As the author notes with reference to Andrew Nathan and Andrew Scobell's (2012) foreign policy rings, it is probable that what is found in the China–Africa context also applies to China's approach toward the whole developing world – three-quarters of humanity. That Benabdallah's analytical structure focuses on shaping themes such as in journalism and Confucius Institutes and not on particular countries or sub-regions in Africa likely extends the Global South relevance of her work.

China appears to be evolving a new form of cross-country international relations power accumulation, with a focus on the Global South. Based on painstaking fieldwork in the selected areas of thematic focus, Benabdallah helps us to appreciate that international relations power, of China in particular, should not be understood only via a traditional coercive or repressive lens, nor that of conflict or war. China's alternative emerging knowledge accumulation and network-building approach within the Global South may, that is, ultimately and differently forge international power too. This work hopefully serves also to inspire onward scholarship that helps us to understand that prospect and its dimensions too.