Security provider meets security seekers: Explaining the support for China’s Global Security Initiative through role alignment

Abstract China’s Global Security Initiative (GSI), launched in 2022, has rapidly turned into a flagship programme through which Beijing seeks to present itself as an international security actor and foster strategic alignment both within and beyond its immediate neighbourhood. While emerging scholarship mostly discusses China’s intentions behind the GSI, this article places emphasis on analysing how the initiative has been received. In particular, we seek to investigate why a large number of states from the global south have endorsed the GSI by not only lending rhetorical support to the initiative but also increasingly moving to implement specific security-related cooperation projects with China. We take a role-theoretical approach and make the argument that growing role alignment between China and its GSI partners best explains this development. That is, China’s emerging role conception as an international security provider – particularly in non-military domains such as law enforcement, police training, and IT surveillance – resonates with the expectations and needs of many global south states as security seekers, which tend to share similar understandings of security with China and often prioritise internal and regime security. To validate our argument empirically, we provide empirical examples from continental Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and (East) Africa.