Sydney Bailey Fund

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″.

The Conflict Research Society is pleased to share the reflections and findings of Lucy Kentish, recipient of the 2024 Sydney Bailey Fund. Lucy is a PhD student at the University of Bristol whose research investigates the role of education in addressing division in deeply divided societies, with a focus on Integrated Education and Shared Education in Northern Ireland.

With support from the Sydney Bailey Fund, Lucy was able to expand her fieldwork by holding additional focus groups with young people aged 15–21. These conversations provided valuable insights into how students themselves perceive opportunities for cross-community learning and what they want education to offer in a society navigating peacebuilding.

Reflecting on her experience, Lucy explains:

“My interactions with inspirational teachers who warmly welcomed me into their schools, and conversations with young people from all across Northern Ireland, were exactly what I had hoped for, and more.”

As a Visiting Student at Queen’s University Belfast’s Mitchell Institute, Lucy also benefited from close engagement with academics and peers working on conflict, peace, and education. Immersing herself in everyday life in Northern Ireland allowed her to understand the nuances of a society still grappling with its peace process.

Lucy will present her research at the European Conference on Educational Research (University of Belgrade) and at the Conflict Research Society Annual Conference (University of Kent) in September 2025.

The CRS congratulates Lucy on her achievements and thanks all who contribute to the Sydney Bailey Fund, which continues to support early-career researchers in advancing the study and practice of peace and conflict.