Stephen Noakes is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Auckland. His research centres primarily on contemporary Chinese politics and foreign policy. He is a regular commentator on China's role in international affairs and a frequent advisor to the aid community on governance issues in the PRC. He was NZ-China Fellow at Peking University in 2018 and is the recipient of a Taiwan Foundation grant, which he will take up in July 2019 at National Taiwan University. 

He is the author of The Advocacy Trap: Transnational Activism and State Power in China and currently engaged in a pair of book projects. The first is a cross-national comparative study of China's development assistance in the Pacific Islands. The second (co-authored with Dr Chris Wilson) examines challenges to liberal democracy in the twenty-first century, including the rise and resilience of competitive authoritarian regimes, terrorist/guerrilla insurgencies, and far-right populist movements.