Tohu Paerunga, Mātauranga RautakiPostgraduate Strategic Studies

Politics of highly heterogeneous societies, institutional design in divided societies, state-building in Solomon islands, coups and elections in Fiji, Papua New Guinea, debates about patronage, clientelism and money politics, electoral reform, and the economic history of Oceania.

Jon Fraenkel is available to supervise PhD research on constitutional design in divided societies, particularly Bosnia, Northern Ireland, and Fiji, and on electoral systems and electoral outcomes in those countries. He also supervises research on the Pacific islands, particularly Fiji, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Samoa and Tonga, as well as the Chinese presence in the Pacific Islands. 

My current research interests and recent research projects:

• International relations of East Asia: a post-LIO update.

• China's changing relations with the liberal international order: authority and order in world politics (project published: China and the Liberal International Order, Roots of A plural World Order, Routledge, 2026)

• State building and nation building in modern East Asia: contemporary political change in East Asian states (project published: Political Order in modern East Asian States, Routledge, 2022).

• International relations of East Asia: structural, institutional and civilizational dynamics in the shaping of international order in East Asia (project published: International Relations of East Asia, Structures, Institutions and International Order. Macmillan, 2019).

Strategic competition and security in the Pacific, New Zealand foreign and defence policy, Pacific governance, democracy, development and customary land issues. 

East Asian and Pacific security, peace studies, critical strategic studies, U.S. foreign policy, international relations, anti/wargaming and foresight analysis, history of the American progressive movement

My areas of research and interest include: Global Order and Global History, Great Power Politics, Asian Security, and the Sino-Indian Rivalry

Current book project:

I am working on my new book project that analyzes global orders in global history from a longue durée perspective. My premise is that we need to think about past “global orders” that transcended the “world” ordering projects of individual (universal) polities/empires by looking at trans-regional connections across the boundaries of conventionally understood regions and cultures. In other words, we need to move beyond simplistic (and perhaps even reductive) ideas such as “the Chinese World Order” when thinking about historical orders because Chinese polities were simply one part of a larger interconnected space that encompassed locales beyond East and Southeast Asia. The aim of this project is to understand how to think of such larger interconnected spaces – beyond conventional regional “worlds” such as South Asia, East Asia, Europe, and others – in history, and how order was constituted through “global” connections between them. Indeed, in several periods of history, the Indian Ocean and the overland routes across Central Eurasia connected these different regional “worlds”. How was “global” order constituted in the past? What can it tell us about the ordering processes in International Relations? These historical orders may provide us with novel insights to navigate the emerging global order after the passing of the U.S.-led Liberal International Order. 

For background: In the past, I have written on the city-state of Melaka, in the eponymous Strait of Melaka, in the fifteenth century and how it was a crucial node that connected East Asia (the Sinic cultural realm) and the Islamicate-Persian cosmopolis (in maritime Asia/Indian Ocean). See: https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksac072. I have also written on the importance