Welcome!

I am an Associate Professor of International Relations at the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong. My research focuses mainly on two topics. The first is on partisan electoral interventions (foreign election interference). The second is on  strategic public diplomacy. 

My  book  “Meddling in the Ballot Box: the Causes and Effects of Partisan Electoral Interventions” at  Oxford University Press  won the Robert Jervis & Paul Schroeder Best Book Award for 2021 by the American Political Science Association. This book focuses on examining the causes of partisan electoral interventions and its effects on the intervened election results.  These two questions are examined utilizing a dataset (PEIG) I constructed of such U.S. and USSR/Russian interventions as well as, among other things, in-depth archival research into cases in which such an intervention had been seriously considered by a great power and pre-election surveys. The PEIG dataset has been recently updated and expanded (version 2.0) to between 1946 to 2014.

I have otherwise fourteen academic publications, including at International Organization on the effects of the use of whataboutism in international diplomacy, and at Terrorism and Political Violence and at Journal of Conflict Resolution on the effects of partisan electoral interventions on domestic terrorism and the determinants of the views of the American public on partisan electoral interventions by the U.S., respectively. Other publications of mine have examined, for example, domestic factors that discourage alliance disengagement, the causes of regional war and peace, differences in foreign policy preferences between western and non-western publics, as well as the customary law of war.

A reference to my research was made in a 2018 British  House of Commons report about Russia and Russian foreign policy and in a 2017 U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing about the 2016 Russian intervention in U.S. elections.  I have written an op-eds in the Washington Post (Monkey Cage),  Lawfare, and War on the Rocks  about the Russian intervention in the 2016 U.S. election and how to deal with such future meddling. I also wrote (w/Wilfred Chow) a recent piece at Foreign Affairs about our findings regarding the effects of whataboutism. I have given interviews to CNN, DW, NPR,  BBC World,  USA Today, AFP and other media outlets, and have served as a consulted/ quoted expert for multiple news segments and articles on various research related topics for a variety of media organs around the world. 

Prior to HKU, I was a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie-Mellon University. I received my Ph.D from the University of California, Los Angeles.