Senior Fellow, China and Geopolitics
Dr. Friso M.S. Stevens is a Chinese politics and foreign policy specialist, operating at the intersection of IR theory, military strategy, and foreign policy analysis.
His primary research agenda pertains to the debate on China’s resurgence, its strategic implications for the broader Indo-Pacific, and how socio-historical and ideational factors drive China’s quest for ‘national rejuvenation.’ Well-versed in Chinese elite politics and autocratic popular mobilization, Friso has a knack for deciphering the intricacies of CCP organizational doctrine, propaganda, and its emotive nationalist narratives.
Besides security affairs in the Indo-Pacific, his research interests include US foreign policy, the changing global power configuration, regional and world order, and diplomacy, European ‘strategic autonomy’ and economic security, European naval strategy and the Joint Expeditionary Force, and the future of warfare amid new military technological innovations.
In May 2025, Friso’s Ph.D. Dissertation in International Relations from Leiden University was published as a peer-reviewed monograph with the Routledge Asian Security Studies Series under the title Chinese Assertiveness, Ideational Mobilization, and the Rise of Xi Jinping: Achieving Something.
Other research has been published in academic journals such as The Pacific Review, Asian Security, Asian Affairs, Asian Perspective, Journal of Contemporary China, Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, International Politics, as well as in magazines that publish political analysis, such as ChinaFile, East Asia Forum, The Diplomat, Forbes, Atlantisch Perspectief, and The National Interest. Media outlets such as NRC Handelsblad, Trouw, Nederlands Dagblad, NPO Radio 1, as well as The Wall Street Journal, have interviewed him. His op-eds have been published in de Volkskrant and het Financieele Dagblad.
At present, Friso is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Changing Character of War Centre based at Pembroke College, University of Oxford. In the fall of 2025, Friso was a Fulbright-Schuman NATO Security Studies Scholar with the School of Advanced International Studies Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
Previously, he was a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies of the European University Institute in Florence, from 2021 to 2023, and a Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian Studies at the Department of Cultures, University of Helsinki, in 2023-2024.
From 2017 to 2020, Friso was a Lecturer in Political Science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, where he taught qualitative research courses, diplomacy in East Asia, and supervised Bachelor’s and Master’s theses.
Friso holds Master’s Degrees in International Law (Vrije Universiteit and Northwestern University), International Security Studies (Vrije Universiteit), and International Relations (Peking University), a Bachelor’s Degree in Dutch and European Law (Vrije Universiteit), and a Postgraduate Certificate in War Studies (King’s College London).
