Book talk on China and Intervention at the UN Security Council (Oxford: OUP 2019)

China Studies Centre, The University of Sydney

4:00-5:30pm AEDT, Wednesday 11 December 2019
ABS Case Study Lecture Theatre 2140, Abercrombie Building (H70), The University of Sydney
REGISTRATION REQUIRED

This book explains the puzzle of China’s response to intervention at the UN Security Council, arguing that status is an overlooked determinant in understanding China’s decisions, even in the apex cases that are shadowed by a public discourse calling for foreign-imposed regime change in Sudan, Libya, and Syria. The book posits that China reconciles its status dilemma as it weighs decisions to intervene: seeking recognition from both its intervention peer groups of great powers and developing states. Understanding the impact and scope conditions of status answers why China has taken certain positions regarding intervention and how these positions were justified. Foreign policy behavior that complies with status, and related social factors like self-image and identity, means that China can select policy options bearing material costs. China and Intervention at the UN Security Council draws on an extensive collection of data, including over two hundred interviews with UN officials and Chinese foreign policy elites, participant observation at UN Headquarters and a dataset of Chinese-language analysis regarding foreign-imposed regime change and intervention. The book concludes with new perspectives on the malleability of China’s core interests, insights about the application of status for cooperation, and the implications of the status dilemma for rising powers.

This event is co-presented with the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney.

Speaker:

Dr. Courtney J. Fung, assistant professor of International Relations at the University of Hong Kong and associate-in-research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. Her research focuses on how rising powers, like China and India, address the norms and provisions for a global security order. She is particularly interested in how status affects these states as they address United Nations peacekeeping, intervention, and emerging norms, like the responsibility to protect. In 2016, Dr. Fung was an honorary research fellow at the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney during a semester-long research sabbatical. ​​

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