Dr Martina Bernardini

Martina is a Research Associate at the Centre for Grand Strategy, based in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. She has a PhD in War Studies from King’s College London, where she was awarded the Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarship “Interrogating Visions of a Post-Western World: Interdisciplinary and Interregional Perspectives on the Future in a Changing International Order”.

Her research focuses on the analysis of the U.S. political debate on U.S.-China systemic competition in the long run, particularly looking at how the U.S. executive branch and Congress discuss U.S. trade and technology exchanges policy with China. Martina’s expertise has benefited especially from her engagement with the projects run by the Centre for Grand Strategy focusing on the study of world order and macro geopolitical dynamics to inform the foreign policy making process. During her PhD, she also received an additional research award by the Royal Historical Society.

Research Interests:

• S. Political Debate on China
• S. Foreign Policy
• S.-China Systemic Competition
• World Order

Thesis:

Navigating World Orders: the U.S. Strategic Debate on China since 1989

In an increasingly competitive and unpredictable international environment, the U.S. foreign policy debate describes the international order as marked by an opposition between democracies and autocracies. Especially in recent years, the question of whether the U.S. strategy of engagement with China in the past might have allowed China to become a threat to the U.S. national interest increasingly dominated U.S. politics. This research project joins this debate by building a map of the evolution of the U.S. political debate on China between 1989 and 2017, providing a long-term analysis of the foreign policy approaches, economic priorities, and contingencies that were object of discussion by U.S. policymakers debating the policy of engagement with China.