Alice Politi

Dr Alice Politi is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies at DPIR, as part of the Mapping Global China initiative. Prior to this, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Centre for Geopolitics and a College Research Associate at St John’s College at the University of Cambridge, where her research project analysed China’s evolving role as a global actor under the leadership of Xi Jinping. She is also an Associate Editor for the Journal of Current Chinese Affairs (JCCA) and a non-resident Research Associate Fellow at the NATO Defense College.

During her PhD in International Relations at King’s College London, she was also a Senior Executive Officer (Policy Advisor) at the UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and the 2024 Eisenhower Fellow at the NATO Defense College. Alice has previously collaborated as a Policy Consultant with the UK FCDO and participated in projects with the European Commission and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.

She is currently developing her doctoral research into a monograph on EU-China relations during the presidency of Xi Jinping, with a focus on China’s Belt and Road Initiative. More widely, her research sits at the intersection of Chinese Studies and International Relations and examines China’s behaviour as a global actor through the lens of leadership, with a particular focus on Xi Jinping. Her research engages with core debates in IR on identity, practice, and role enactment by asking how political authority shapes state behaviour beyond material capabilities. In this sense, her research builds on constructivist and practice-oriented approaches as well as role-theoretical accounts of how states perform situated understandings of authority, while drawing on philosophical understandings of ethos as modes of conduct and self-relation.

Alongside this research, Alice is currently developing a project examining how technological infrastructure shapes state power and geopolitical competition in the emerging AI ecosystem.

Her work was published in various peer-reviewed articles, and she has produced policy papers and official reports for NATO, the EU, the Italian Senate and the UK FCDO. She has been awarded competitive grants as Principal Investigator and has led on high-level international collaborative research projects.

Alice is the current convenor for the undergraduate course Politics and International Relations of China, 1949-Present  at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge.