The Conflict Research Society is pleased to share the reflections and findings of Xiaodong Bao, recipient of the 2025 Sydney Bailey Fund. Xiaodong is a PhD student at King’s College London. With support from the Sydney Bailey Fund, Xiaodong was able to expand her fieldwork by holding additional interviews and multi-sited ethnographic research.
Reflecting on her experience, Xiaodong explains:
“As a recipient of the 2025 Sydney Bailey Fund, I’m pleased to share my research with the Conflict Research Society community here. I’m Xiaodong Bao, a PhD student at King’s College London. My research examines China’s engagement in UN peacekeeping operations, with a particular attention to the internal fragmentation and hierarchies within the peacekeeping community itself. Drawing on feminist International Relations and postcolonial peacekeeping studies, I attend to the micro-politics of peacekeepers’ daily lives, to explore how individual Chinese peacekeepers experience and negotiate layered regulations, hierarchical power relations, and contradictory subjectivities. Methodologically, this research is grounded in life-story interviews with former peacekeepers and participant observations of their everyday environments.
Last year, I completed the first phase of my fieldwork in China, spending 6 months conducting approximately 30 life-story interviews with former peacekeepers. This was an invaluable research journey. The stories I encountered gradually unsettled my initial assumptions about peacekeeping. I was really enjoying listening to those messy, mundane, yet deeply revealing accounts from the peacekeeping frontline. I was not only a researcher, but also a listener, a “comrade”, and at times a co-traveler in the emotional landscape of these interviewees’ disillusionment or honourable episodes.
With support from the Sydney Bailey Fund, I will be able to advance a crucial second phase of fieldwork. Building on the interviews already conducted, the award enables multi-sited ethnographic research. This includes participant observation during a short visit to ongoing UN missions, as well as visits to peacekeeping training centres in China. These in-person engagements will allow me to connect pre-deployment training, everyday mission life, and post-deployment reflections in a single analytical framework. Also, the funding will support a series of follow-up interviews with peacekeepers and relevant officials.
I will continue developing this research through doctoral writing and conference presentations, including sharing findings with the Conflict Research Society community at the Annual Conference in September 2026″.