Cheng Xu

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 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.

Select Publications

Xu, Cheng. (2023). “Cherry-picking Tradition and Selective Modernization: The Insurgency of the Indigenous Cordillerans of the Philippines.” Civil Wars 25, no. 1: 77-102. https://doi.org/10.1080/13698249.2023.2177055. 

Bertrand, Jacques & Cheng Xu. (2023). “Indigenous Groups and Ethnic Minorities”. In Routledge Handbook of Civil and Uncivil Society in Southeast Asia, edited by Eva Hansson and Meredith Weiss. London: Routledge, 242-259.

Xu, Cheng Min. (2021). “Book Review: Collective & State Violence in Turkey: The Construction of a National Identity from Empire to Nation-State.” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 15, no. 1: 141–144. https://doi.org/10.5038/1911-9933.15.1.1824.

Xu, Cheng. (2020). “Critical Barriers to Joint-Production: Datu Politics and Insurgent Fragmentation in Southern Philippines.” Third World Quarterly 41, no. 5: 881-897. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2020.1723411.

Xu, Cheng. (2019). “The Critical Impasse of Peacebuilding: Towards an Analytically Eclectic Critique of Liberal Peacebuilding.” International Journal 74, no. 4: 581-599. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020702019896302.

Xu, Cheng. (2018). “Nationalism, Necessary and Sufficient for Genocide? A Counterfactual Account through Comparative Case Study of Nazi German, Shōwa Japan, and Fascist Italy.” Genocide Studies International 12, no. 2: 234-252. https://doi.org/10.3138/gsi.12.2.07.

Xu, Cheng. (2018). “‘Draining the Sea’: Counterinsurgency as an Instrument of Genocide.” Genocide Studies International 12, no. 1: 6-25. https://doi.org/10.3138/gsi.12.1.02.