In “Rising Powers and Global Peacekeeping Governance: India, China, and the Politics of UN Peacekeeping in Africa” (International Peacekeeping, 2026), Dr Rajeesh Kumar (Research Fellow, MP-IDSA) argues that India and China are not passive participants in United Nations peacekeeping but active shapers of how it is governed. The article moves beyond familiar portrayals of the two states as “norm-takers or ambiguous actors” and asks instead how their engagement translates into influence over the mandates that define missions in Africa. Kumar identifies three mechanisms through which that influence works: material leverage from troop contributions, institutional positioning in the Security Council, and discursive intervention in mandate negotiations.
Much of the argument rests on the weight of sustained deployment. Africa hosts the majority of UN missions, and India and China rank among the largest contributors of troops to them. For India, decades of service since its first deployment to the Congo in the 1960s have produced “operational credibility and moral authority” that it converts into diplomatic weight. Kumar makes the point concretely: during the 2011 negotiations over the mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India signalled the possible withdrawal of critical helicopter units unless the concerns of troop-contributing countries were addressed, turning a material contribution into leverage over the mandate. That authority has been dearly bought: Kumar notes that India is among the states that have lost the most personnel in UN service.
China’s path runs differently. Kumar traces its shift from Cold War scepticism, when Beijing treated peacekeeping as a vehicle for great-power intervention, to its present standing as the largest troop contributor among the permanent members and a major funder of the peacekeeping budget. Its permanent seat lets it work through the Council itself, shaping mandate language, promoting a development-oriented idea of peace, and, increasingly, using abstention to register reservations without blocking resolutions. Its deployments have nonetheless grown more robust, including an infantry battalion sent to South Sudan in 2014, its first large-scale combat role. China’s abstentions rose steeply in the 2021-22 period, which Kumar reads as a more assertive and differentiated posture rather than disengagement.
What gives the analysis its edge is the weight it places on African states. India and China, Kumar argues, do not act on Africa so much as with it: their positions on sovereignty, sanctions and host-state consent frequently converge with those of the three African members of the Security Council, and it is in that alignment that influence becomes visible. In debates over the Central African Republic, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, coordinated positions and joint abstentions fed into real adjustments to sanctions regimes and mandate language, evidence that argument in the chamber can be traced into the text of resolutions.
The wider claim concerns the shape of peacekeeping itself. Rather than dismantling the liberal model built by Western powers, Kumar contends, India and China are adapting it, producing mandates that are “more constrained, context-sensitive, and politically grounded”. He reads their rise not as a rejection of peacekeeping norms but as their “pluralization through practice”, with governance increasingly settled through negotiation among Western states, rising powers and African actors. The article’s contribution is to treat two states so often cast as norm-takers or spoilers as “embedded institutional actors” whose sustained presence is reshaping the rules from within.
