In December 2024, Romania's Constitutional Court annulled the first round of the presidential election, citing evidence that foreign-orchestrated digital manipulation — involving over 600,000 bot accounts, algorithmic preferential treatment on TikTok, and Russian-linked cryptocurrency funding—had corrupted the electorate's capacity for free will-formation.

Commentators characterized the annulment as an act of militant democracy: an extraordinary measure to safeguard the integrity of the democratic system.  This intervention, however, remained fundamentally reactive. The defense came only after votes had been cast and the information environment had already been compromised. The Romanian case crystallized a question that constitutional law has not adequately confronted: how should democracies defend the integrity of their digital information environments against systematic foreign authoritarian interference, and do so before the damage is done? This question is especially urgent in relation to the People's Republic of China, whose challenge is structurally distinct from Russia's. While Russia operates "like a hurricane" — acute, disruptive, immediately visible — China operates "like climate change" — gradual, systemic, and long-term in its reshaping of the global information ecosystem.  China's threat operates not merely through content manipulation but through three interconnected vectors: the global extraction of personal data from democratic societies, enabling the construction of what I term a "societal mosaic," a composite profile that maps a target society's vulnerabilities and social fault lines through aggregated data; the deployment of AI models embedded with authoritarian censorship and political bias into democratic information markets; and the systematic manipulation of information flows through coordinated inauthentic behavior, amplified by generative AI capabilities. The convergence of these vectors represents a qualitatively new challenge for constitutional democracy.

No democracy confronts this challenge with greater urgency than Taiwan. Situated at the front line of the PRC's digital authoritarian expansion, Taiwan faces information manipulation at unmatched scale and intensity — nyet it has also developed one of the most comprehensive whole- of-society defensive responses among democracies. Despite this, Taiwan's experience has not been systematically analyzed through the lens of constitutional democratic self-defense theory, and the rich governance innovations it has produced remain largely invisible in international legal scholarship. This dissertation seeks to change that: by centering Taiwan as its primary case study, it aims both to advance constitutional theory through Taiwan's experience and to bring that experience into the international academic conversation on democratic resilience.

What motivates the American public to support Taiwan in a potential conflict with China? This project utilizes an experimental design to examine three common rationales — physical security, economic security, and democracy defender — to determine which narrative has the greatest impact on shaping American public opinion regarding the defense of Taiwan. The project holds both academic and practical value. In terms of the war support literature, it advances our understanding of the types of "costs" citizens prioritize when considering military operations overseas. For policymakers, this research may help craft more effective messaging and improve communication in U.S.–Taiwan relations.

My PhD dissertation examines how migration from the Japanese empire to the United States reshaped the boundaries of race, nationality, and imperial belonging. It focuses on a small but revealing group of migrants from colonial Taiwan who crossed the Pacific in the early twentieth century and entered the United States as Japanese nationals of Chinese ancestry. I argue that the transpacific Taiwanese migrants expose how the American logic of racial classification and Japanese imperial hierarchies converged and confronted one another. Classified as Chinese under U.S. exclusion law, yet governed as Japanese colonial subjects, Taiwanese forced both empires to grapple with contradictions between race, nationality, and political loyalty. By tracing patterns of migration, diplomatic negotiations, and legal disputes, this project demonstrates how imperial racial regimes developed relationally yet unevenly through transpacific encounters, and how, in the process, incongruent forms of differentiation across empires were masked under the category of "race."

Although fewer than sixty Taiwanese migrants entered the United States before 1945, their trajectories provide a powerful lens into the broader structures of imperial governance, racialization, and mobility across the Pacific. This small number, in fact, bears witness to the uniquely constrained position of Taiwan as the only colony affected by U.S. immigration laws targeting racial "Chinese," thereby forestalling the possibility of large-scale labor migration such as that seen among early U.S.-bound Koreans and Okinawans. Being caught between Japaneseness and Chineseness carries archival consequences: the social and legal lives of Taiwanese migrants are submerged among the reams of Chinese American and Japanese American records. It takes a decolonial praxis to read Taiwanese traces in Asian American archives not simply as part of the history of U.S. discrimination against Chinese and Japanese migrants, but as a product of the successive colonizations of the island under Chinese and Japanese empires. To that end, this study supplements these materials with official documents from the Japanese metropole and the Government-General of Taiwan, as well as personal correspondence, publications, and family collections. In doing so, it engages in decolonial and transpacific archiving to probe the meanings of the transient Taiwanese imprints rendered between Japanese and Chinese, race and empire, colored and colonial.

My doctoral dissertation project employs anthropological and museum studies theories, together with ethnographic fieldwork methods, to develop a multi-sited museum ethnography that examines the complexity of Taiwanese identity and fills a gap in comparative museum research. On the one hand, the dissertation analyzes the major work of selected national museums in Taiwan over the past five to ten years, including their principal collections, major permanent and special exhibitions, and related educational outreach activities. On the other hand, it offers a thick description of how these museums constructed Taiwanese history and culture from 2023 to 2025, as well as how domestic and international audiences imagined Taiwanese history, culture, and national identity. Taken together, the dissertation explores the social functions and contemporary significance of Taiwan's national museums. I argue that national museums in Taiwan are significant for the following reasons: first, they reflect Taiwan's idiosyncratic national identity and multiculturalism; second, they manifest multiple perceptions of Taiwanese national history; third, they serve as the window for Taiwan's cultural diplomacy. In my view, studying the six selected national museums helps to construct a more comprehensive understanding of Taiwan's distinctive national museum-scape.