Next up in our ongoing portrait series, we have Cheng Xu stepping into the spotlight! Cheng is a former Canadian Armed Forces infantry officer and paratrooper with the Third Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. In 2014 he deployed on Roto 0 of Operation Reassurance in Central and Eastern Europe. As a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science, he is specializing in Comparative Politics, International Relations, and Development Studies. His doctoral thesis, entitled “It Takes a Village to Raise a Rebel: Social Relations and their Impacts on Insurgent Mobilization” aims to explore the social roots of insurgent mobilization and how they shape civil war outcomes with a focus on the Philippines. Cheng is a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholar and a Junior Fellow at Massey College. He served as the 2021-2022 Cadieux-Léger Fellow with Global Affairs Canada, under the Department’s Foreign Policy Research and Foresight Division as well as a Senior Policy Analyst with the Foreign Policy Planning Division supporting Canada’s Feminist Foreign Policy. Cheng is also an Ambassador for the International Institute of Genocide and Human Rights. His research interests include insurgency movements, civil wars, ethnic conflict, and genocide.
