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Alexander Vuving

Associate, International Security Program

Contact:
Email: alexander_vuving@ksg.harvard.edu

Experience

Alexander L. Vuving is an Associate of the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He is working on security strategies of Asian states in an age of China’s rise and a book manuscript that grows out of his dissertation.

His dissertation examines the case of Vietnam since the mid-1980s to explore the sources of grand strategy and mechanisms of strategic change. The research suggests that grand strategies emerge as a response to perceived shifts in the distribution of economic, political, or military power at the international level. The pressures of international power are, however, not translated but converted into foreign policy through the filter of worldview, which is enabled by historical experience of domestic-international encounter. Strategic change in foreign policy follows a “strategic algorithm,” which incorporates four major mechanisms—balancing against threat, bandwagoning with power, learning, and survival by transformation. His work on Asian security strategies applies these insights to suggest that the rise of China will divide, rather than unite, Asia.

Mr. Vuving has a long-term interest on a Sociology of World Politics, which basically involves the mediation between and co-figuration of the global, the social, and the political. He has written on co-figuration as a mechanism of the constitution of the state and the world. He has been invited to give lectures, has published in scholarly journals and magazines, and given radio interviews. His current research interests include the sources and the making of grand strategy and world order, grand strategies of the great powers in the post–Cold War era, Asian security, and a reformulation of realism that also draws on insights from constructivism and liberalism.

Mr. Vuving holds a Ph.D. in Political Science, as well as an M.A. in Political Science, Economics, and Sociology, from the Johannes Gutenberg University (Mainz, Germany).