University of New South Wales
Fengshi Wu is an Associate Professor in Political Science and International Relations at the School of Social Sciences, University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia. She specializes in environmental politics, state-society relations and civil society, and global governance with the empirical focus on China and Asia. She was a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard-Yenching Institute (2008-2009) and a Graduate Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences (2004). Her academic works have appeared in Environmental Politics, China Journal, VOLUNTAS, China Quarterly, Global Environmental Politics, Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, Journal of Contemporary China and International Studies Quarterly. Her edited book, China’s Global Conquest for Resources (Routledge, 2017), focuses on Chinese overseas investment in and acquisition of natural resources. A/Prof. Wu received her PhD in political science from the University of Maryland and BA (Hons) in international relations from Beijing University. Before moving to Australia, she held academic positions in Singapore and Hong Kong.
Research statement
Overall, my research sits in between comparative politics, environmental studies, and global governance, and takes advantage of the various research methods offered by all of these fields. I study China as an important example of a developing country, transitional polity and rising global power to explore the fundamental theoretical debates in political science and provide empirical evidence for the underlining causal mechanisms in the fields of international relations, comparative politics and environmental politics that, to a great extent, are increasingly driven by non-traditional forms of actors and agencies. In recent years, I have conducted fieldwork and published new research related to environmental politics, civil society development and political transition in South Korea, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Vietnam, and Russia.
Asian Civil Society Research Network 