RESEARCH AGENDA
I study how rising powers address the norms and provisions for global governance and international security, with a primary focus on China, and more recently, India. My work contributes to general knowledge on causes of multilateral cooperation amongst states, and specifically identifies under what conditions and how these rising powers engage in international order-making. My research moves beyond debates about socializing rising powers into existing normative hierarchies, taking seriously their ideational and material capacities to reshape orders in their own making, with a focus on status, norms and human protection issues broadly defined (e.g. cyber norms, UN peacekeeping, intervention, and the responsibility to protect).
My work contributes to several intellectual agendas. I seek to illuminate the study of International Relations by integrating area studies, using China as a case to test and develop general arguments about sources of cooperation. My research also contributes to efforts to globalize the discipline by studying a rising China's perspective as an opportunity to deepen our understanding of theory. I use new and original empirical data garnered from elite interviews and participant observation to inform studies of international order and global governance.
I am currently a co-investigator on two competitively-funded projects:
mapping new security networks, led by University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Effective Global Action and supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York
examining the PRC use of grey zone tactics in the Indo-Pacific region, led by the Department of Security Studies & Criminology, Macquarie University and supported by the Australian Department of Defence Strategic Policy Grants Programme
My work has been supported by a number of research fellowships, to include a 2023 Fulbright Scholarship to the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. I was also a 2012 post-doctoral fellowship with the now Columbia-Harvard China and the World Program supported by the MacArthur Foundation, based at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University. I held pre-doctoral fellowships with the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University, and with the Global Peace Operations Program at the Center on International Cooperation, New York University. My research has twice been supported by a Hong Kong Research Grants Council Government Research Fund grant (GRF), a Hong Kong Research Grants Council Early Career Scheme (ECS) award, the Konosuke Matsushita Memorial Foundation, and the Scaife Foundation.