I am stoked that our Research Unit (FOR 5913/1) "Learning Empire: Autonomy, Dependence, and China's Emerging Imperial Practices" has been granted funding of €5 million by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Especially since 2013, Chinese leaders began moving beyond joining the Western-led global order and started learning how to build global hierarchies centred on China. Our Research Unit seeks to understand whether and how China is learning to act as an empire of the 21st century.

My research project, "Ideology of Empire: China’s Ideational Binding Practices in Global Governance" examines the ideological aspect of China’s evolution as a ‘learning empire’. It asks to what extent China’s advancement of ideas about global governance and international politics in the Xi-era constitute a novel imperial ideology. It does so via an emphasis on “ideational binding”, one of the five imperial practices at the centre of the overall project. 

A full description of the Research Unit's agenda can be found here.

My article "Beyond multilateralism: China’s international order building through transnational policy forums" was published in The Pacific Review.

I was an Academic Visitor at St Antony's College at the University of Oxford. 

On 24 November I presented my research at the University of Oxford China Centre.

My article "The Diffusion of Global Power and the Decline of Global Governance" was published in Ethics & International Affairs. 

It is part of a roundtable on "Global Governance in Hard Times" edited by Benjamin Faude and John Karlsrud. Please take a look!

I presented my research at the IPSA World Congress of Political Science in Seoul, South Korea. 

I presented a paper, co-authored with Johannes Scherzinger (University of Zurich), at the Global Governance Research colloquium at Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo. The talk was kindly hosted by Danielle Flonk. 

I participated in a workshop on "Democracy, Autocracy, and International Cooperation" at the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities. The host was Prof. Jonas Tallberg of the University of Stockholm.

My contribution "No Clean Slate: China’s Organizational Entangling and the Prospects for Global Order Transition" (authored together with Yuqian Cai) was published in International Studies Review. 

I participated in a project meeting of the research group "Learning Empire" at the University of Bremen. Our kind host was Prof. Wiebke Raabe. 

I presented my research at the DFG Workshop “Contested Regionalism and Its Effects” at the Fee University Berlin. The workshop was organized by Prof. Diana Panke.  

Together with China specialists from throughout Germany I presented a new research agenda on China called "Learning Empire" at the German Political Science Association (DVPW) congress in Göttingen. The panel was organized by Professor Tobias ten Brink from Constructor University. 

I participated in a roundtable at the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy in Bilbao. The roundtable was organized by Professor Oliver Kessler at the University of Erfurt.

I presented my research at the Department of Politics at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. It was a pleasure to return to my alma mater.

I presented a paper at Leiden University’s Third Global Transformations and Governance Challenges conference in the Hague. The paper, co-authored with Daniëlle Flonk at Hitotsubashi University, looks at China's changing institutional strategies in global internet governance.

I presented my research in progress at the annual convention of the International Studies Association in San Francisco. It was great to be back at the ISA in person for the first time in several years after covid interruptions.

I am happy to see my piece "China and the Limits of Hypothetical Hegemony" published in Security Studies.

It is a response to Darren Lim and John Ikenberry's article "China and the Logic of Illiberal Hegemony" from 2023. Find the authors' reply here.