ABSTRACT
Both the People's Republic of China and India are key participants in two complementary and overlapping elements of a global security order, as troop contributors to UN peacekeeping operations and as normative actors reshaping the responsibility to protect, both elements that challenge traditional sovereignty, making particular concerns for both China and India given their colonial histories and self-appointed positions as anti-imperialist Global South leaders. The chapter covers brief studies of China's and India's peacekeeping profiles, focusing on why these states deploy and their policy positions. The chapter next traces how China and India have engaged with the responsibility to protect since the introduction of the norm in 2001, through its institutionalization at the 2005 World Summit, and through its implementation in the seminal case of the 2011 Libya crisis, when both states were at the UN Security Council. The chapter finds that while the two countries modify a global security order in different ways, they do share similarities in their more modest attempts to lead with new ideas and thinking, with both states still preferring an idealized version of a prior status quo, where sovereignty and territorial integrity are the respected foundations for global security.
