Hey everybody,

I am scholar of International Relations, with a special interest in international security, language and the human mind. My research has been funded by the Government of Japan, the Gerda Henkel Foundation’s Special Programme Security, Society and the State, and the International Studies Association. Over the past decade, I have examined when, why and how people, media outlets, foreign and defence-policy elites, and state leaders, think about security threats and communicate these to others.

The results of this research have been published in Routledge’s book series The Cold War in Asia, as well as in the International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, Japanese Journal of Political Science, Risk and East Asia, Foreign Affairs, Journal of Cold War Studies, Australian Journal of International Affairs, the Journal of Advanced Military Studies.

My current research project investigates how leaders understand and experience security threats by drawing on the mental structures that encode incoming information (e.g. the spatial and conceptual structures), and the distinctive features with which leaders experience the world. You can read about it here.

Looking forward, using mixed-methods, and drawing on insights from conceptual semantics, neuroscience, cultural psychology, comparative philosophy, Buddhism and Daoism, as well as on the work of IR scholars, I am keen to deepen our understanding of threat perception in the context of international relations and to explore the utility of introspection and meditation as ways of generating valid knowledge about international relations.

I hope that with better understanding of threat perception, we would be able to reduce instances of unwarranted suspicion, fear and escalation between actors in the international system.