Ongoing Research Projects

Grant Period : Aug 2024 to Dec 2024

Faculty : CHU, Jonathan A.

The first project is a solo-authored monograph on how the democratic community and international organizations influence military humanitarian interventions. My proposal for this project, entitled Liberal Democratic Community and Humanitarian War, has already received a positive reception from the editor of Cambridge Elements: International Relation, a series edited by Jon Pevehouse (Vilas Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UW Madison, and previous editor of International Organization), who is a leader in my field, and so I have been invited to complete the manuscript and submit it for review.

The project will advance a major debate on why international organizations can influence global support for military foreign policy. Existing arguments focus on rational, material, and legal factors—political communities and international organizations (like the United Nations) can signal to people that a foreign policy will be successful, worth the costs, and legal under international law.

The second project is a set of papers in collaboration with Scott Williamson (Asst. Prof. University of Bocconi) and Eddy Yeung (Ph.D. Student, Emory) on international mass opinion on democracy. Given the global decline in the health of democratic governance, and criticisms of western-centric notions of democracy, our projects will present fresh data, using new techniques in experimental survey design, to shed new light on how citizens around the world think about democracy. It specifically will answer two questions: (1) how citizens around the world define “democracy”—e.g., emphasis on procedures, rules, elections, fair outcomes, participation, or something else—and (2) how they prioritize of democracy versus other aspects governance (e.g., prioritizing public health and safety vs the ability to participate in elections).

Grant Period : Nov 2023 - Oct 2026

Faculty : LIU, Yao Adam

I study how Southeast Asians’ economic preferences affect their foreign policy preferences, especially security policy preferences, amidst China-US rivalry. The project has three components. The first is a traditional survey that uses canonical trade theories to predict individual’s security policy preferences. The second is specifically about choosing sides, where different trajectories of development in China and the US will be randomized in a conjoint experiment. The final component is a vignette experiment on a showdown between in the Taiwan Strait. Randomized are the predicted probabilities of US intervention. The goal is to assess how individuals wish their governments to respond. 

Grant Period : Dec 2021 to Nov 2026

Faculty : CHU, Jonathan A.

My research explores the causes and consequences of public and elite opinion in international relations, focusing on how law, identity, and norms shape individual beliefs about foreign policy issues. The substantive domain of my inquiry covers the three major areas of the laws of war: jus ad bellum (the right to war, conflict initiation), jus in bello (wartime conduct), and jus post bellum (ending wars, transitional justice), but will also engage with issues relating to people’s beliefs about liberal democracy and a liberal world order. My geographic scope is global but will focus on the U.S., UK, and East Asia. The primary mode of research employs survey and experimental methods but will also engage with other approaches.

The significance of this research is twofold. Theoretically, international relations research has focused on interstate or system-level explanations for outcomes relating to warfare, rather than individual-level factors, which is the focus of my research. By examining variation across individuals, my research innovates by bringing in social psychology and behavioral economics to answer international relations questions. Empirically, I will bring new data to the field via original polling work, the most novel of them being of elite samples. 

Grant Period : Jan 2021 - Jun 2025

Faculty : KHONG, Yuen Foong

One of the most pressing foreign policy challenges Singapore and the rest of Southeast Asia face in the coming years is how to position themselves between the US and China as the geopolitical rivalry between the two superpowers intensifies. Like most of its Southeast Asian neighbours, Singapore would prefer not to have to choose between the two superpowers, but that position will become increasingly difficult to maintain as the US and China pressure states in the region to align with them. This project seeks to answer four key questions related to this strategic dilemma: What does it mean to choose (between the US and China)? How can we track the shifts in alignments of the countries of Southeast Asia over time? What explains their alignment choices? And what are the implications for Singapore, the superpowers, and the region?

Our project will bring together a group of scholars from the region and beyond to puzzle through, research, and answer these questions. The Co-PI of the project is Professor Joseph Liow (Comparative and International Politics, NTU), and our multidisciplinary team of collaborators include Professors Ang Cheng Guan (History, RSIS/NTU), Charlotte Setijadi (Anthropology, SMU), and Lu Xi (Economics, LKYSPP). Ten scholars will be invited to join the project as contributing authors: each will write a ten thousand world chapter on the ASEAN country of their expertise, documenting and analyzing the country’s alignment choices over time. These chapters, together with the Introduction and Conclusion written by the PIs, will constitute the major output—an edited volume aimed at a good University Press—of the project. Two Post-Doctoral Fellows—specialists in the international relations of Southeast Asia—will also be recruited to help organize and run the project, while they convert their dissertations into publications that address the themes of the project.

The findings of the project will add value to the local, regional, and international research landscape by clarifying the meaning of choice, devising techniques to measure it, and formulating hypotheses to explain it. In so doing, the project seeks to deepen our theoretical and empirical understandings of strategic alignments in a time of change, while providing policymakers with the requisite information and data to aid their decision-making.