The exponentially growing engagement of so-called emerging partners (particularly China) with Africa has been one of the most noted developments in the continent’s international relations over recent years. The potential consequences of these growing South-South partnerships for EU-Africa relations have sparked extensive academic attention, with analyses mainly focusing on how the development cooperation principles of China differ from those of the EU and on how these different approaches translate into concrete cooperation modalities and play out in practice.
This paper is part of a research project that studies the competition between the EU and China on an ideational level, namely that of their diverging strategic narratives regarding development and development cooperation. While the content and historical roots of the European and Chinese narratives are quite well known by now, this paper zooms in on the hitherto understudied aspect of how these very different EU and Chinese narratives are received by African publics. Are they accepted, rejected, recreated in new ways? Which specific elements are deemed attractive or convincing, and which ones are not? How is narrative reception influenced by counternarratives, government narratives, historical legacies and discrepancies between rhetoric and action?
Building upon a previous research phase that analysed cross-country survey data, this paper presents the first results of a more in-depth qualitative inquiry into such narrative reception. It analyses data collected from South African university students through Q sort methodology, a little-known technique that allows for a systematic yet flexible inquiry into respondents’ subjectivities. The study’s results shed light on how these future South African elites interact with contrasting narratives and how they orient themselves geopolitically in a changing world.
