This Paper focuses on how China’s multiple identities—mostly as a great power in-the-making and a developing country—influence its leaders’ articulation of foreign policy discourses around peace and security. This is particularly evident in Chinese decision makers’ shift to a different understanding of the country’s participation in security regimes than in the past, as a result of social interaction and as a product of identity construction dynamics. Thus, I argue, China is both the subject and the object of socialisation processes within such security regimes, and I suggest to rethink said dynamics in light of ‘non-hegemonic international order’ and ‘worldist’ projects, as well as the performative power of the imaginaries to which certain norms refer to. By drawing from postcolonial and poststructuralist concepts, we should be able to bridge these theories with constructivist scholarship on norms and socialisation, as this will allow a more salient analysis of China’s international behaviour as influenced by its multiple identities. This idea is further elaborated through an empirical analysis of China’s multilateral forums diplomacy within the United Nations Security Council and the African Union with regards to peace and security issues on the African continent. An examination of the PRC’s discourses on peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and conflict prevention, based on extended fieldwork in Beijing and Addis Ababa, will reveal the influence of its Janus-faced identity, as well as the importance of interaction with other actors in creating new, transnational security policies.
