Interests above Influence: China’s Security Presence in the Middle East–North Africa Region

The deterioration of the U.S.-China relationship over the last decade has resulted in the increasing prevalence of a great-power competition framework of analysis for international politics, in which both countries have extensive interests that come to be seen as theaters of competition. The dynamic of this rivalry in the Middle East–North Africa (MENA) region, where the United States is the dominant extraregional military power and China is the dominant economic one, has created an acute need for original scholarship to better understand how the region features in both countries’ foreign policies. While the academic literature on U.S. foreign policy in MENA fills libraries, the work on China’s foreign policy toward the region is at a nascent stage. Andrea Ghiselli’s Protecting China’s Interests Overseas: Securitization and Foreign Policy is an important contribution to the field