SG - Powers Shifting World Order

Vineet Thakur is University Lecturer in International Relations at the Institute for History, Leiden University. He studied at Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi) and has previously worked at Ambedkar University (Delhi), University of Johannesburg and School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) London. He was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Amsterdam, and Smuts Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University. He is the author of V.S. Srinivasa Sastri: A Liberal Life (2023); India’s First Diplomat: V.S. Srinivasa Sastri and the Making of Liberal Internationalism (2021); The Imperial Discipline: Race and the Founding of International Relations (2020 – with Alexander Davis and Peter Vale); South Africa, Race and the Making of International Relations (2020 – with Peter Vale; winner of the Francesco Guicciardini Prize for the Best Book in Historical International Relations); Postscripts on Independence: Foreign Policy Discourses in India and South Africa (2018) and Jan Smuts and the Indian Question (2017).

Jean Dong is a Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School. Jean authored a monograph titled “Chinese Statecraft in a Changing World: Demystifying Enduring Tradition and Dynamic Constraints,” published by Springer Nature. Her research interests span Chinese history and political culture, Asian strategic security and geopolitics, the future of multilateralism, and the value alignment of transformative AI. 

Since 2016, she has served as a task force member of the G20 think tank engagement group, contributing under the leadership of South Africa, Japan, China, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, and India. Jean has played an active role in shaping policy recommendations for the G20 leadership on topics such as AI-Energy Twin Transition, WTO reform, fiscal policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the future of multilateralism.

Prior to her academic and policy pursuits, Jean accumulated extensive industry experience in bilateral and multilateral economic diplomacy.

Laurien Crump has worked as a researcher at the Centre for Parliamentary History at Radboud University since September 2024. She is currently researching foreign and defence policy (1982-94). She also researches transatlantic security questions and the European security architecture after the Cold War, including NATO expansion, and the historical and geopolitical context of the war in Ukraine. Her multi-archival research is positioned at the cross-section of history and international relations, often in comparative perspective. More broadly Laurien is specialised in pan-European diplomacy during and after the Cold War, with a special focus on the relations between Eastern and Western European countries and relations with the United States. As such, she has also focused on the current challenges posed by the Trump-administration on the rules-based order. Laurien has also worked twelve years at Utrecht University as inter alia Associate Professor in Contemporary European History, where she obtained her PhD cum laude in 2014. She has completed her Veni-research on pan-European security and diplomacy in the 1980s in Utrecht. Laurien publishes prolifically on a broad range of topics and regularly comments on current international affairs in various media in the Netherlands and Belgium with attention for the historical and geopolitical context, including the Global South.