Overview of Research Interests
My research and teaching focus on the international relations of East Asia, China’s foreign relations, and international security. I am particularly interested in studying the extent to which the conventional narrative of power politics in international relations theory accounts for the patterns of cooperation and conflict in historical and contemporary Asia. My scholarship draws on empirical qualitative methods to analyze China’s security interactions with its peers and counterparts, not simply with a focus on China in a vacuum. By investigating the power dynamics and authority relations between China and its neighbors, I identify how countries in Asia with disparate capacities develop the requisite norms, consensus, and institutional mechanisms to incentivize strong-state restraint and achieve security and stability without resorting to such measures as military balancing or coercion. My aim is to expand the horizons of empirical research in international relations and area studies and to provide insights to an audience within and beyond academia interested in Asian security and international politics.
Cutting against the grain of the conventional wisdom in international relations and the China field, this project delves into a new theoretical framework and applies the argument for strong-state restraint to China’s foreign relations in the South China Sea. China has shown more restraint in its statecraft in the highly consequential conflict than is most often acknowledged. In particular, when ASEAN member states develop strong security norms aimed at defusing tension in the maritime dispute, their collective approach becomes a formidable source of influence in incentivizing China to support regional security initiatives that it previously resisted. This key finding draws on new empirical evidence to show explicitly how small states induce change in a large power’s behavior, and thus a positive theoretical advance with a probative argument on strong-state restraint as a legitimation strategy.
This project looks at the historical basis of state formation in East Asia. The development of centralized bureaucracies, administrative capacity to provide public goods, tax, and field large, organized militaries occurred in Korea, Japan, China, and Vietnam centuries before Europe and for reasons of emulation, rather than war or competition. This project examines the ideational, cultural, and historical determinants that undergirded this political phenomenon in East Asia, and how they delimit the conventional narrative/bellicist thesis that "war made the state, and the state made war." This study of state formation moves beyond both Eurocentric and Sinocentric preoccupations to be more comparative in nature.
How does ASEAN's emphasis on organizational minimalism induce change in its members' policies? This new book project examines the institutional efficacy of ASEAN and the politics of interference in traditional and non-traditional security issues affecting regional security and stability over the last two decades. From tackling the humanitarian crisis in Myanmar to the transboundary haze in the Indonesian archipelago, conflict mediation in Aceh and East Timor to the border conflict between Cambodia and Thailand, this research identifies the extent to which closer regional integration by subtle interference has occurred with each period of crisis.
This multi-year project looks at the U.S. "pivot" or "rebalancing" strategy to Asia from a new and different angle. In particular, the project examines how the newly-emerging U.S. security relations with Myanmar, Vietnam, and Indonesia are impacted by these Southeast Asian countries' long-standing economic, diplomatic, military, and cultural ties with China. The project involves in-depth and comparative field studies in Myanmar, Vietnam, and Indonesia and is supported by the MacArthur Foundation.
This project investigates the implications of the global ascent of China on cross-Strait relations and the identity of Taiwan as a democratic state. Examining an array of factors that affect identity formation, the empirical findings consider the influence of the rapid military and economic rise of China on Taiwan’s identity. The assessment offers new insights into which policies have the best chance of resulting in peaceful relations and prosperity across the Taiwan Strait and builds a new theory of identity at elite and mass levels. It also possesses implications for the United States-led world order and today’s most critical great power competition.