Protecting the Party: China’s Holistic Security Concept in Africa
Monday 25 November 2024
Lundi 25 novembre 2024 - 15h-17h
Ecole militaire - Salle modulable 1 et 2 (sous l’Amphithéâtre Foch)
Séminaire Asie-Afrique AAMO
Protecting the Party: China’s Holistic Security Concept in Africa
Professor Joshua Eisenman & General Jacques Deman
Resume
Pr. Joshua Eisenman’s intervention will focus on China’s “holistic security” approach, which Xi Jinping introduced in 2014, prioritises non-traditional security topics that threaten the Communist Party’s monopolies of power in the political, economic, and cultural sectors. In 2018, President Xi Jinping told African leaders in Beijing “China champions a new vision of security featuring common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security.” By extending this politicised conception of security to its relations with African countries, Beijing has expanded its engagement and influence in areas such as media, education, culture, party-to-party, propaganda, technology, and security diplomacy.
General Jacques Deman will discuss the previous purposes, and focus on China’s behaviours in Africa such as her main approaches (multilateralism versus all-bilateral relations), the effectiveness of her security actions (visible actions versus credible actions) and to conclude a weak security presence or a real impact.
Joshua Eisenman is professor of politics at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses on the political economy of China's development and its foreign relations with the Global South—particularly Africa. His latest book, China’s Relations with Africa: A New Era of Strategic Engagement (Columbia University Press, 2023) with David H. Shinn, explains how China builds relations with African countries to advance its larger geostrategy. The book is a follow-up to China and Africa: A Century of Engagement (University of Pennsylvania Press), which was named one of the “Best International Relations Books of 2012” by Foreign Affairs. In 2020, that book’s updated second edition was published in Chinese by the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. In China Steps Out: Beijing’s Major Power Engagement with the Developing World (Routledge, 2018), Eisenman worked with Eric Heginbotham to analyze and compare China’s policies toward the Global South. Eisenman has been a visiting professor at Peking University (2016), Fudan University (2017), and Shanghai International Studies University (2023). He holds a Ph.D. in political science from UCLA and an MA from Johns Hopkins (SAIS) including a year at the Hopkins-Nanjing Centre (2001-2002).
Jacques Deman has a military and diplomatic background and spent 40 years within the French ministry of defence. He was promoted Brigadier General in 2017. As a junior engineer officer, he toured the world and has been deployed in several regions, from Oceania to the Middle East and Africa. Later on, he joined the diplomatic area, first under a French label, in Africa where he was assigned, first to the Economic Community of Central Africa States (ECCAS) for two years (2010-2012) as senior advisor to the secretary general for Peace and security issues in the sub region. As a European Union employee, he became a special advisor to the African Union Peace and security department, in Addis Ababa - Ethiopia where he served for more than five years. When in Addis, he was in charge of the African Union partners group, which encompassed up to 44 states or organisations’ representatives, including China. In 2018, he joined the Africa directorate of the European external action service, the diplomatic service of the EU in Brussels where he was initially in charge of the African Peace Facility, a financial tool devoted to support African led Peace and security initiatives. He moved later on the European Peace Facility division as the head of sector for assistance measures, the current financial tool the EU is using to support Defence and military worldwide.
