Isaac Owusu Frimpong’s China’s Emerging Security Diplomacy in Africa explores an ambitious topic: the growth of China’s security role on the African continent and the implications of this growth for international politics. The book’s central argument, that China has moved from a long-standing doctrine of “non-interference” to a position of “non-indifference,” particularly under the leadership of Xi Jinping, is explained through a neoclassical realist framework focused on Xi himself. Drawing primarily on secondary sources, the author attempts to foreground African institutions, such as the African Union (AU), in his argument, an endeavour that is valuable in its own right and distinguishes the book from China-centric accounts that give little attention to African agency. The author does so over nine chapters, including an introduction and conclusion, explaining different theoretical debates within international studies, Chinese diplomacy and neoclassical realism as part of different “Geostrategic Waves” in part one of the book before detailing China’s “Monroe Doctrine,” engagement with the AU, and peacekeeping operations in part two of the text. The book concludes with two chapters in part three.
Still, the volume could benefit from stronger empirical grounding and clearer analytical development. The core claim that Xi Jinping personally represents the decisive turning point in China’s Africa policy is not fully substantiated by the evidence provided. Many of the trends that Frimpong associates with Xi, such as China’s growing contributions to UN peacekeeping, its concern with protecting Chinese nationals overseas, and its careful diplomacy in African conflicts, can be traced back, even within the text itself, to earlier periods, such as the 2000s. The author’s own historical narrative identifies continuities but does not reconcile these with the claims of Xi-driven change. A stronger account of bureaucratic politics, institutional evolution and the structural drivers of China’s overseas engagement would help strengthen the central argument.
Frimpong’s discussion of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), for example, treats it as a coherent strategy with strong causal explanatory power for Chinese policymaking. However, scholars such as Eyck Freymann, Min Ye and James Reilly argue that BRI is an umbrella under which diverse and often pre-existing activities have been retroactively grouped. For instance, the renaming from “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR) to the BRI was itself a post-hoc branding decision rather than a substantive policy shift. While the book notes both names, it does not explain the significance of this rebranding. Indeed, the treatment of BRI is indicative of the risks in assuming coherence in Chinese policymaking where empirical evidence often points instead to fragmentation, incrementalism and domestic-policy drivers as more illuminating explanations of China’s overseas practices.
Methodologically, the text relies almost exclusively on English-language secondary sources, and this produces several challenges. Without primary sources, whether interviews, Chinese government documents, African policy documents, policymaker speeches or PLA publications, it becomes difficult to assess the validity of claims underlying Chinese motivations or the internal dynamics of Chinese policymaking. Furthermore, as the text makes limited use of the work of Chinese scholars such as Li Anshan, Tang Xiaoyang, Liu Haifang, He Wenping, etc., the absence of these perspectives restricts the text’s ability to capture the full range of internal Chinese debates shaping China’s Africa policy. The resulting analysis occasionally risks circularity, with secondary interpretations used both as evidence and as theoretical scaffolding on the part of the author.
Another issue with this methodological approach is the analyses of the evidence itself, such as how the text treats Chinese “non-interference” historically. The book often suggests that China adhered strictly to a doctrine of non-interference through most of the post-1949 period. However, this account is contradicted by substantial evidence from scholars cited in the text, such as Philip Snow, David Shinn and Joshua Eisenman. Indeed, these cited scholars demonstrate that China played an active role in various movements overseas throughout the Mao era, going so far as to ship weapons and train guerrillas to help destabilize governments. That is not to say that the Chinese state considered these actions “interference,” nor that African governments are unaware of this history, but rather that it is up to the scholar to unpack how any policy was historically implemented and the narratives around said implementation. Such historical nuance might help situate contemporary Chinese security practices within a longer arc of strategic engagement.
In addition, conceptual imprecision surfaces throughout the book. For example, the text’s treatment of Chinese economic engagement in Africa refers to “Chinese investment” without distinguishing between foreign direct investment (FDI), which requires ownership and control, and state-supported contracting financed by loans from Chinese policy banks. In terms of dollar amount, most of China’s economic presence in Africa falls into the latter category. The distinction is not merely technical: it has direct implications for security analysis. China has a different set of incentives when considering how to protect an entrepreneur who owns a factory in Nigeria (a genuine investment) versus a state-owned enterprise executing a policy bank loan-backed construction project (not an investment). The conflation of these categories is a common misunderstanding in public discussions of China–Africa relations, but for a scholarly monograph it represents a missed opportunity to clarify the conceptual foundations underlying China’s overseas risk management and security interests.
As such, the intended audience remains difficult to discern since the text does not neatly fit a scholarly, policy or practitioner audience in its current form. The book does not yet substantially extend existing China–Africa scholarship theoretically or empirically in ways that would serve specialists. On the other hand, its engagement with secondary literature, which could be strengthened by incorporating more Chinese scholars and Chinese-language scholarship, does not fully serve readers seeking introductory bibliographies, given the well-curated resources already available. The book is a little unpolished, with errors that would have been caught with another round of editing.
Even so, Frimpong’s effort to craft a theoretical framework that integrates African and Chinese perspectives is promising. Synthesizing security studies, China studies and African politics is a genuinely difficult task, and Frimpong’s determination to build bridges between these fields deserves recognition. As it stands, this manuscript may serve as a useful entry point for both emerging scholars and the author himself towards developing research in which the methodological execution more fully matches the theoretical ambition.
