Raoul Bunskoek

Raoul Bunskoek is a senior researcher at the University of Bayreuth as well as a senior research fellow and coordinator of the Clingendael China Centre. Within the INFRAGLOB project, he researches how Chinese political-economic practices in African countries (re)shape global governance and what this means for International Relations (IR) theorizations. More generally, his research focuses on comparative Western and post-Western (especially Chinese, but also African) conceptualizations of morality and power in IR and how these are reflected in the relating strategies of the US, China, various African countries and the EU, particularly with regard to China’s 2013-proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). In this light, he has recently published ‘Community of Common Destiny’ as Post-Western Regionalism: Rethinking China’s Belt and Road Initiative from a Confucian Perspective’ (2021, with Chih-yu Shih), ‘Towards global relational theorizing: a dialogue between Sinophone and Anglophone scholarship on relationalism’ (2019, with Nordin et al.), as well as the book China and International Theory: The Balance of Relationships (2019, with Chih-yu Shih et al.). Raoul holds PhD and MA degrees in Political Science and International Relations from National Taiwan University, and a BA in Chinese Studies from Leiden University. He has previously worked for the Hu Fu Center in East Asia Democratic Studies and the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica (IPSAS) in Taipei, Taiwan (R.O.C.).