Book Projects

Propaganda as Provocation: How Autocrats Use Political Rhetoric to Impede Democratic Uprisings

In contemporary autocracies where democratic uprisings have gained momentum, a special form of propaganda exists: political messages that blatantly taunt or mock the opposition. Instead of diverting citizens’ attention away from opposition voices, such propaganda directs its rhetoric and public attention toward the opposition and the ongoing movement. What is the political logic behind it?

My book project, Propaganda as Provocation, offers a provocative explanation: such propaganda aims to enrage, disgust, and radicalize the opposition. By radicalizing protesters in social movements, the autocrat can discredit regime opponents and dissuade the rest of the public from joining forces with the opposition. Thus, provocative propaganda can help delegitimize the opposition and dissipate the momentum of democratic uprisings, benefiting authoritarian survival.

I examine my theory in Hong Kong, where the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) movement is one of the largest democratic uprisings in recent history and where the opposition—despite the presence of robust civil society—radicalized in the shadow of provocative propaganda. First, I conduct content analysis on local media outlets to illustrate the strategic timing of provocative propaganda. Then, I use an experiment to demonstrate the radicalizing effects of provocative propaganda, showing causal evidence that regime opponents in Hong Kong reported higher levels of anger, disgust, and violence support upon randomized exposure to such propaganda. I distill my theory and experimental findings in an article, The Logic of Provocative Propaganda in the Shadow of Democratic Uprisings, which won the 2024 Timothy E. Cook Best Graduate Student Paper Award from APSA’s Political Communication Section.

Beyond the experimental test, I use original survey evidence to demonstrate the downstream political consequences of radicalization, showing its delegitimizing impact on the movement and legitimizing effects on government repression. After providing microlevel evidence consistent with the observable implications of my theory, I triangulate primary and secondary sources to qualitatively trace the opposition’s responses to provocation and radicalization during the Anti-ELAB movement. Lastly, I provide a comparative case study of the political communication strategies in other autocracies amid recent democratic uprisings to shed additional light on the generalizability of my theory. By offering and testing an original theory of how autocrats use political rhetoric to impede democratic uprisings, my dissertation brings new theoretical insights into the comparative study of propaganda and elucidates the logic of top-down provocation in politics, demonstrating how emotions can be weaponized by governments on social media to strategically instigate violence in time of conflict.

My book project has been generously funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, Princeton’s Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice, Emory’s Halle Institute for Global Research, the Institute for Humane Studies, and APSA’s Centennial Center.

Deescalating a Trade War: Strategies and Reciprocities in the Shadow of US-China Rivalry

Deescalating conflicts often requires some positive signal from one side and reciprocation by the other. How a country reciprocates—and how its domestic public and international rival respond to its reciprocation—is critical to deescalation. Existing scholarship focuses on one form of reciprocation: balanced reciprocity. In this book project with Kai Quek, we delineate and theorize two additional general forms of reciprocation: semi-reciprocity (reciprocation perceivably less than received) and super-reciprocity (more than received). We apply our theory to the US-China trade war, a hard case for deescalation due to the salience of relative gains amid great power rivalry. Conducting parallel experiments in both countries, we test how different strategies of reciprocity shape the domestic feasibilities of deescalation. Our dyadic experiments show, for the first time, how the form and sequence of reciprocation influence the prospect of rapprochement. By tracking potential outcomes across different policy counterfactuals in the populations at stake, we shed light on the public dynamics underlying the different pathways of deescalating a trade war that has profoundly impacted the world.

This timely and compact book project is under advance contract with Cambridge University Press, Elements in International Relations series.