Hui-Chen Lai

Hui-Chen is currently a PhD candidate at the Department of War Studies at Kings College London. She holds academic backgrounds from Marine Science and Electronic Engineering and has working experience in Defence sector for a decade. Her interests have evolved from grand strategy to maritime security and military strategy. Other than that, she is also concerning the security issues from environmental degradation such as climate change particularly in the Indo-Pacific area. Hui-Chen's research focuses on how military could be more proactively playing a crucial role in cooperative operations in non-traditional security especially regarding maritime humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR).

 

Research Interests

• Grand Strategy
• Military Strategy
• Non-Traditional Security
• Maritime Security
• ROC Foreign Policy
• Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief
• Climate Change

 

Thesis

How navies could utilise overseas Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) operations to better realise the constructive function of naval diplomacy?

Non-traditional security still has little attention from governments. Accordingly, the content of national security needs to be understood in a broader context. The enemies we faced today should not constrained to hostile counterparts, instead, the catastrophes from natural disasters have increased tremendously within decades.

With the exponential growth of disruptive scale resulted from non-traditional threats, armed forces applied in HADR operations has been a global trend. Navies, in particular, are the competent candidates for flexible use that could be applied according to the type of missions and the roles they play. In other words, navies could be customised to play diverse roles in various missions simultaneously or with subtle transition.

Within this context, we might wonder have navies fully developed their potential other than warfighting capabilities. In this respect, the diplomatic function of naval HADR deserves to be further examined. It could be a win-win initiative for navies to act as reliable contributors in offering humanitarian aid and assisting in capacity building in less developed coastal countries while building closer ties with alliance and affected countries. Therefore, this thesis will hope to make contribution to fill the gap while having implications to policymakers in maritime strategic planning in the future.

Supervisor

Dr Alessio Patalano