Shing-hon Lam

Shing-hon Lam

PhD candidate at UCLA

Publications

Staffing the United Nations: China’s Motivations and Prospects

Published in International Affairs, 2021

With Courtney Fung. A developing public commentary views China as exerting influence in international organizations to legitimize and disseminate PRC foreign policy values and interests. This article examines an understudied source identified by PRC elites to promote influence in the United Nations system: dispatching PRC nationals as international civil servants, specifically in a targeted pursuit of executive leadership positions. Using decades of UN staffing data, we find that apart from Russia, China holds the fewest executive leadership posts among the aspiring and permanent members of the UN Security Council. Moreover, China is yet to lead an agency addressing international security matters. US and European staff contributions are significantly higher at all staffing levels of the international civil service. Still, the data shows that China made modest, targeted gains in most specialized UN agencies, and agencies headed by PRC nationals show faster increases in PRC staff members, though all base numbers were low. We draw from Chinese-language sources to discuss issues facing China in increasing its international civil service numbers, affecting the country’s ability to shape global governance.

Recommended citation: Fung, Courtney J., and Shing-hon Lam. 2021. "Staffing the United Nations: China’s motivations and prospects." International Affairs 97(4): 1143–1163. https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiab071

Contesting Roles: Rising Powers as “Net Providers of Security”

Published in Journal of Global Security Studies, 2020

With Courtney Fung. What is a “net provider of security,” or a “global security provider”? How are such roles adopted by rising powers? We define a net provider of security as a social role, when an actor provides novel, niche, and functionally differentiated security duties, supporting burden-sharing in providing public goods. The nascent literature on these US-vectored roles characterizes role adoption as largely successful. However, rising powers contest the US-designated net provider of security role. Rising powers have stated or latent foreign policy goals to shape international order in their strategic vision, reflecting ideational capacity to reconceptualize their role in global politics, or a material capacity to reposition their rank. Building upon insights from role theory, we illustrate that rising powers exploit temporal and rhetorical ambiguities and leverage their material and ideational resources to execute role differentiation through three micro-processes of role resistance—role acknowledgment, role task rejection, and role task substitution—used to promote an idiosyncratic role, casting the US-vectored role as non-functional, non-representational, and untenable. We examine crucial cases of rising powers, India and China, to develop our theoretical contribution. Our findings speak to the literatures on the logic of identity management, rhetoric in international politics, the taxonomy of contemporary ad hoc security arrangements, and the epistemological project of globalizing international relations.

Recommended citation: Fung, Courtney J., and Shing-hon Lam. 2021. "Contesting roles: Rising powers as “net providers of security”." Journal of Global Security Studies 6(3): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1093/jogss/ogaa034