Speakers:
Roland Gillah, Master’s Candidate, Columbia SIPA
Seamus Boyle, Master’s Candidate, at Columbia SIPA
Lucie Lu, current C&WP fellow for the 2023-24 academic year
Sabine Mokry, CWP fellow for the 2023-2024 academic year
Ayumi Teraoka, Postdoctoral Research Scholar, WEAI
After one of the most dramatic presidential campaigns in Taiwan’s history, January 13, 2024 saw the election of Taiwan's William Lai Ching-te of the Democratic Progressive Party. Stepping into this leadership position, Lai, who currently serves as vice president, will have to address a number of foreign policy challenges. They include: a deteriorating relationship with the People’s Republic of China; a United States interested in preventing a cross-Strait conflict; and countries around the globe seeking the expansion of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry. For the next four years, Taipei will likely continue to maintain the status quo and policies of current President Tsai Ing-wen. At home, Taiwan will also grapple with a number of urgent issues. Wages have stagnated, and youth unemployment has led to disillusionment. Other issues, such as economic diversification and the rising costs of living and housing, are areas that the new president will need to address. How will the new president confront these concerns – domestically and abroad? Are there prospects for deeper cross-Strait cooperation between Taipei and Beijing? How might the election impact the Indo-Pacific region and beyond? Join The China and the World Program in collaboration with the Weatherhead East Asian Institute for this crucial discussion on the future of Taiwan and its foreign relations in the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election by a cohort of SIPA students who were in-country in the lead up to the election and several C&WP fellows.
For more information and to register, please click HERE.
Speakers' Bios:
Roland Gillah is a Master’s Candidate in SIPA at Columbia University. This past summer, he served as a Research Fellow on Protection of Civilians at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, and prior to graduate school, he was a conflict analyst and humanitarian access negotiator. He worked for Mercy Corps’ Libya Analysis Team during the 2019-2020 Tripoli offensive and the Congo Humanitarian Analysis Team during the 2018-2020 Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Most recently, he served as Humanitarian Access & Security Manager with Humanity & Inclusion in North East Syria, working on demining and health activities. He started his career working on security sector reform in the U.S. Department of Defense and the Hacking for Defense program, based in Silicon Valley. He earned his B.A. in International Relations from Tufts University.
Seamus Boyle is a Master’s Candidate in International Security Policy at Columbia SIPA. This past year, he served as a researcher with the Atlantic Council’s Young Global Professional Program, performing OSINT Chinese-language research about critical and emerging Chinese technology markets and Chinese foreign policy initiatives. Prior to SIPA, he served as an executive assistant to a United Nations ambassador preparing memorandums for an incoming Security Council team, and worked as a research assistant for the Project 2049 Institute in Arlington, Virginia, and the Center for Asia-Pacific Resilience and Innovation in Taipei, Taiwan. Seamus earned his B.S. in International and Comparative politics and Chinese from Reed College. He is a native of Taipei and speaks fluent Mandarin.
Lucie Lu is a current C&WP fellow for the 2023-24 academic year. She studies international relations with a regional focus on China. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2023. Her research delves into China’s global influences in three international regimes: media, human rights and foreign aid. Her ongoing research endeavors explore each of these topics individually as well as their intersections. Her dissertation studies how power shifts have happened in unexpected areas where China possesses an obvious disadvantage because of its authoritarian regime characteristic and how it manages to earn status in social media, human rights and foreign aid regimes. Her research has received support from the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research as a Schroeder Summer Graduate Fellow, the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Illinois, EITM Summer Institute (2022), and the APSA Political Communication Section.
Sabine Mokry is a CWP fellow for the 2023-2024 academic year. She received her PhD in Political Science from Leiden University and is an associate researcher at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA) in Hamburg. In her dissertation, she investigated under what conditions Chinese societal actors, specifically think tankers and scholars, influence the construction of China’s national interest. Before pursuing her PhD, she worked at the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) as a research associate focusing on China’s foreign and security policy. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Contemporary China, Foreign Policy Analysis, The Pacific Review, and International Politics.
Ayumi Teraoka is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Japan Research Program at Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute. Her research focuses on coercive diplomacy, alliance politics, and Japanese foreign policy and national security. She is currently working on a book project, Strategy of Alliance Management, which examines the interactive effects of US alliance management efforts and China’s attempts to weaken US alliances from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Dr. Teraoka was an America in the World Consortium Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin from 2022 to 2023 and previously worked as research associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Council on Foreign Relations. She received a PhD and an MA in Security Studies from Princeton University, an MA in Asian Studies from Georgetown University, and a BA in Law from Keio University.
This event is hosted by China and the World Program and co-sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.
