New data and AI-powered methods for tracing normative agency in China-Uzbekistan relations: towards a book manuscript

My ESRC fellowship will be centred around writing a book manuscript from my PhD, which problematises Europe’s historical and present hegemony in Asian international relations and political economy, foregrounding Uzbekistan’s narratives of Chinese (neo)coloniality, anticolonial resistance and normative agency. The Fellowship will also enable me to (1) expand my dataset of Uzbekistani narratives by collecting documents beyond 2022; (2) develop my methodological design through engagement with AI-powered machine learning; and (3) develop my career prospects by engaging with new research communities and writing a new postdoc grant proposal. Connectedly, I aim to organise a training on AI-based document analysis for policy, two book workshops, and three roundtables at the BISA and EISA-EWIS conferences. This project develops my doctoral research into a book manuscript, following the strong recommendation of my PhD examiners. The core thesis of the book is that the interaction between agency and structure in intra-Asian normative relations can be more productively understood through local, non-Eurocentric stories about agency and coloniality. By problematising Europe’s historical and present hegemony in Asian international relations and political economy, I aim to foreground Uzbekistan’s narratives of Chinese (neo)coloniality, anticolonial resistance and normative agency. Through an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship, I will transform my PhD into a publishable manuscript by updating data and deepening methodological innovation. The updated data collection is pivotal because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, is a central case study for Uzbekistan’s normative agency in my book. I maintain that the West experienced the invasion as an existential epistemic crisis, promoting economic decoupling, but, in Uzbekistan, political actors renounced the crisis mode, resisting the adoption of foreign interpretations of the war and the necessity to take sides. Documents from 2022 to 2025 will help me further strengthen my argument. AI will help me develop the Structural Topic Model (STM) I used in my PhD through large language models (LLMs, for example, GPT used in the popular ChatGPT). These are computational models trained with large amounts of data operationalised through ‘neural networks’, the so-called ‘transformers’, which reproduce human language. I aim to advance the statistical performance of my STM through a recent LLM-based STM pipeline. Transformers will improve my document analysis by reducing my role in labelling and describing topics, improving rigour and replicability. To support the development of my manuscript, I will organise two workshops, one at SOAS and one at Harvard, engaging key scholars in Central Asian and China studies. One of these will take place at the Davis Center's Central Asia Program, Harvard University, during a visiting period. Engagement with the British and European International Studies Associations will further develop the book’s visibility and academic reach, with roundtables targeting debates in coloniality and political economy. The fellowship also lays the foundation for a new project on South-South ‘reglobalisation’. This follow-on research will examine the everyday political economy of communities of production across the Global Majority, focusing on agency, innovation, and transnational linkages in Chinese-led production networks. I aim to submit this as a Marie Curie Global Fellowship and a Leverhulme Early Career or British Academy Fellowship. I will also host a workshop at the EISA European Workshops in International Studies to refine this new agenda. Together, the book and follow-on project reframe Central Asia’s position in the global order through the lens of postcolonial agency and bottom-up innovation.