PhD "The Weaponisation of Ideas: US-China Competition in the Symbolic Field"

The Brussels School of Governance, Department Institute for European Studies, Research Group European security in the Indo-Pacific age is looking for a PhD-student with a doctoral grant. 

The Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy (CSDS) of the Brussels School of Governance (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) is seeking to recruit a PhD researcher to work on a research project funded by the Flemish Research Foundation (FWO) entitled: “The Weaponisation of Ideas: US–China Competition in the Symbolic Field”.

The project is led by Prof. Caterina Carta and embedded within CSDS’ broader research agenda on great power competition, international security and strategic narratives.

CSDS is a leading research centre in the field of international security, diplomacy, and strategy, with strong expertise in great power competition, transatlantic relations, and Asia–Europe relations. Researchers will be embedded in an international, interdisciplinary, and methodologically diverse environment, and will benefit from extensive academic and policy networks in Brussels and beyond.

More concretely your work package, for the preparation of a doctorate, contains: 

While International Relations scholarship has extensively examined the military, economic and technological dimensions of US–China rivalry, this project focuses on its ideational and symbolic dimensions. It investigates how ideological, cultural and civilisational narratives are mobilised as instruments of power and how they contribute to the construction of adversarial collective identities.

Grounded in International Relations theory and discourse theory, the project analyses US and Chinese narratives between 2000 and 2024 across multiple symbolic fields, including official political discourse, academic debates and selected cultural outputs. Methodologically, it adopts a mixed-methods approach, combining machine-learning–enhanced text-as-data analysis with qualitative discourse analysis.

The project aims to produce a set of high-quality scholarly outputs, including peer-reviewed journal articles, a research monograph and an edited volume, alongside policy-oriented publications and expert workshops. Researchers recruited under this project will contribute to the collection, organisation and analysis of large textual corpora (English- and Chinese-language), the development of analytical categories and indicators and the interpretation of discursive patterns related to identity, ideology and strategic rivalry. The project places strong emphasis on collaborative research, methodological pluralism and publication-oriented teamwork, and is particularly suited to candidates interested in combining theoretical work in International Relations and discourse theory with hands-on empirical analysis using qualitative and computational methods.

You will devote most of your working time to research. Additional tasks may include limited teaching activities, event organisation, and contributions to the broader activities of CSDS. The postdoc is expected to publish in peer-reviewed journals and actively contribute to the project’s collective outputs.

For this function, our Brussels Humanities, Sciences & Engineering Campus (Elsene) will serve as your home base.