What explains China's deployment to UN peacekeeping operations?

Abstract

What explains China's deployment to UN peacekeeping operations? Material factors are necessary but insufficient to explain China's calculus; identity is a key causal variable also. China is the only permanent UN Security Council member to claim dual identities as a great power and a Global South state in regards to peacekeeping and is therefore receptive to social influence from its respective peer groups. I apply competing explanations for deployment against the critical case of China's 2007 commitment to the UN-African Union Hybrid Mission in Darfur, a least-likely case for identity-based explanations. I use extensive interviews of Chinese and UN foreign policy elites, participant observation at the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, and written sources to reconstruct the case. The article concludes with reflections on rising powers and peacekeeping, and the implications on the scope conditions for identity as a variable in Chinese foreign policy and China's intervention behavior more broadly.