I am a Senior Associate in the Asia Research Division at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), currently based in Brussels. Since joining SWP in 2013, I have worked on Chinese foreign policy, geopolitics, geoeconomics, and China’s role in shaping regional and global order. My work combines academic research with policy advice for the German Federal Government and the German Bundestag, with a particular focus on China’s domestic and foreign policy, German-Chinese relations, and the strategic implications of China’s global rise.
I hold a PhD in Political Science from the University of Hamburg, where I completed my dissertation, Regions and Intertwined Actors: The Chinese Constitution of Central Asia. Before joining SWP, I was a researcher and postdoctoral scholar at the GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies in Hamburg. My current research is closely linked to collaborative academic projects, including CHINAGLOBAL – How China Shapes Global Governance (financed by the BMFTR) and our DFG Research Group Learning Empire, in which I lead work on China’s emergence as volumetric empire. These projects reflect my long-standing interest in how China uses discourses, connectivity, and strategic practices to reshape the logic of international politics, but also increasingly dominates existing and newly established spaces of world politics.
My books and edited volumes include The Chinese Constitution of Central Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Regional Powers and Regional Orders (Routledge, 2011, co-edited), and The Multidimensionality of Regions in World Politics (Routledge, 2021, co-edited). Among my more recent publications are studies on China’s world-order ambitions, Germany’s China policy in the Zeitenwende, China’s geopolitical code, and the spatial dimension of geoeconomic change. My research is informed by repeated academic stays in China, including research visits, expert exchanges and guest professorships in Beijing and Shanghai, as well as earlier language study in Nanjing. These experiences have shaped my perspective on China’s strategic thinking and its evolving international role.
Learning Empire 