Researcher
Lunting Wu
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Summary
Lunting Wu is a Senior Research Fellow in the Research Group for Eastern Europe and Asia at NUPI, as well as an Associate at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA). His research interests revolve around foreign policy analysis, political economy, diplomacy, and global governance, and cover regions including China, Southeast Asia, European Union, and Latin America. He holds a PhD in International Relations (2023) from Freie Universität Berlin. He is the author of the book "Belt and Road Initiative in South America: Explaining the varying responses" (Palgrave 2024), and his works have appeared or are forthcoming in peer-reviewed journals such as International Affairs, Foreign Policy Analysis, Global Studies Quarterly, Global Policy, and International Politics.
Expertise
Education
2023 PhD in International Relations, Freie Universität Berlin
2018 Master in International Relations, University of Lisbon
2016 BA in Foreign Language Studies, Macau University of Science and Technology
Work Experience
2024-2025 Guest researcher, Zeppelin University
2024 Lecturer, Berlin School of Economics and Law
2023-2024 Postdoctoral Researcher, Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS)
2019-2023 Doctoral Researcher, SCRIPTS Cluster of Excellence, Freie Universität Berlin
2019 Assistant Researcher (H2020), University of Lisbon
2018 Research Intern, United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies
Aktivitet
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Building influence: China's Belt and Road Initiative and the geopolitics of infrastructure
Over the past decade, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has redrawn physical, economic, and political maps. From ports in the Indian Ocean to...
Chinese infrastructure power in a changing global landscape and its alternatives
This seminar draws on five years of research to examine China's Belt and Road Initiative and its alternatives, from Europe and Latin America to Southeast Asia and the MENA region.
Ghosting diplomacy: China's silent treatment amid great power competition
If diplomacy is about communication, how does ghosting communicate? China has increasingly used ghosting or silent treatment when practising diplomacy. It has purposefully cut off high-level communication channels with its ‘significant others’ in recent years. When and why does China ghost other states, including its most important partners? How does strategic ghosting fit with the more combative turn in China's ‘wolf warrior diplomacy’ under Xi Jinping? Current scholarship on emotional diplomacy largely focuses on the display of emotions but rarely deals with diplomacy in which the expressions of emotions are covert. This article argues that ghosting diplomacy usually follows a perceived severe violation of core interests; rather than directly displaying emotions like anger, silent treatment is a covert aggression that is punitive by nature. Building on works of emotional diplomacy, security studies and social psychology, this article contributes to the conceptualization and theorization of interstate silent treatment in International Relations and unravels the motives of states to resort to this strategy. Through discourse analysis in a single case-study on China's silent treatment of the United States in the aftermath of former House speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan in 2022 and the 2023 incident involving suspected surveillance balloons, the research provides a thick description and explanation of how China's ghosting diplomacy unfolded amid heightened geopolitical tensions between the two great powers. As such, it is relevant for both scholars and policy-makers working in foreign policy, in that it sheds light on this covert aggressive form of diplomacy, and on how states can best respond to it.
“BRIexit”: Unravelling Withdrawals from the Belt and Road Initiative
Twelve years into the launch of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), over 140 countries have joined, but a few have left. These withdrawals, or BRIexit, though limited in number, raise crucial questions about the prospect of Beijing’s flagship initiative and the shifting geopolitical landscape in which it operates. What explains the withdrawals? More importantly, has there been any impact on the legitimacy of the BRI? Whilst some BRIexits stem from economic calculations, others reflect changing state preferences or mounting external pressures—trends that could reshape the BRI’s future, especially under a more aggressive second Trump administration.
Roads to Power? The political effects of infrastructure projects in Asia (ROADS)
Does investing in infrastructure in another country generate increased political influence? ROADS seeks to answer this question by zooming in on China’s global infrastructure role and ...