Blurb
Alexander Yen is a DPhil candidate in International Relations at the University of Oxford, where he studies the strategic use of ‘undiplomatic’ language in United Nations General Assembly discourse and what it reveals about rising powers, status, and contestation over international order. His work sits at the intersection of diplomatic practice, political rhetoric, and the interpretive and quantitative analysis of elite speech, with a focus on how states justify, signal, and revise their relationship to prevailing norms.
Outside his research, his interests include academic dress and institutional tradition, economics, the common law and the British constitution, and science fiction, particularly as a way of thinking clearly about authority, obligation, and the shape of future orders.
Full Biography
Alexander Yen is a Hong Kong-born student of politics and history whose family story traces wider patterns of modern Chinese migration: his father’s family moved from Shanghai to Hong Kong, his mother’s from Guangzhou to Hong Kong, both then moved to Australia, and eventually back again to Hong Kong. He spent twelve happy years at Diocesan Boys’ School in Hong Kong, where he completed the I.B. Diploma and formed friendships that have endured across continents and careers. While at school, he was an indifferent student, doing reasonably well at the things he liked (English, History) and tolerably poorly at the things he wasn’t very good at (Chinese, Math). He absorbed a bit of Biology (at the ‘Standard’ level) and Economics (at the ‘Higher’ level), and credits his worldliness (if at all) to the free copies of The Standard which were always distributed right outside the MTR station from whence he began his commute and furnished him with reading material for the journey.
As a young man he went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, to read for a B.A. in History and Politics. His undergraduate years were shaped as much by tutorial arguments and late-night conversations as by formal study, and by a small group of friends, among whom the duo with whom he would come to form the ‘three musketeers’ of the Magdalen history cohort. He was elected to the college scholarship (called at Magdalen demisocii, half fellow, shortened to ‘demy’) and received the proxime assessit to the H.W.C. Davis Prize for coming second in his history cohort. He eventually won First-Class Honours in his finals.
During this period he dabbled in a few things and was an officer for various student societies, including the two then-extant societies that catered to Hongkongers at Oxford. He also became a Life Member of the Oxford Union (for the city-centre library, bar, and toilet, as he always likes to say) and of the Oxford University Conservative Association. The most influential, however, was his initiation into Freemasonry, beginning a continuing involvement in a tradition that combined ritual, fellowship, and charitable work in ways that resonated with his own interest in institutions and inherited forms. He is boundlessly grateful to Magdalen for the joys of three happy years of young manhood, and will loyally prize the Magdalen tie above almost all others in token of that gratitude.
After his first degree, he sought an M.Phil. and D.Phil. in International Relations at Oxford, translating at the same time to Green Templeton College, where he has focussed on the use of undiplomatic language at the United Nations General Assembly and what it reveals about rising powers, status, and contestation over international order. A fuller account of his academic interests and research can be found here.
Along the way he has taught both undergraduate and master’s students at Oxford as a graduate tutor, and has worked with secondary school pupils through Oxford-based summer schools, introducing them to the study of politics, history, and international affairs.
In parallel, he has held a range of Masonic offices at lodge and provincial level, gaining experience in governance, mentoring, and the quieter administrative labour that keeps voluntary institutions functioning. In particular, he has gained commercial procurement and merchandising experience through his roles. Further details of his academic work, teaching, and formal roles can be found on his curriculum vitae.
Alexander aims to develop as an analyst and consultant on international politics with a distinctly historical sensibility, bringing together empirical research, historical comparison, and close attention to political language, looking also to blend with this already potent combination a reasoable understanding of monetary and financial economics.
He is interested both in how states act in the international system and in how they explain, justify, and dress up those actions to themselves and others. At the same time, he sees himself as a generalist thinker concerned with questions of regime, authority, and obligation: how political communities remember their past, argue about their present, and imagine their future institutions.
Alexander is a communicating member of the Church of England, with a strong interest in liturgy, academic dress, and university and civic ceremony as ways in which communities express continuity over time. His legal and constitutional interests centre on the common law tradition and the British constitution, especially the relationship between unwritten norms, institutional practice, and formal authority.
His cultural tastes run from science fiction, particularly Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, which he admires as a far-sighted statement on the role of diligent study and commitment to the future, to plays such as Forty Years On and Arcadia, which he values for the way they weave together memory, loss, and intellectual play. Musically, he is a grade 5 A.B.R.S.M. pianist, and enjoys pieces in the classical tradition, whether written three hundred or thirty years ago. He is also a great enjoyer of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. He is a keen, though perhaps not especially good, photographer and poet. He also has a long-standing affection for the English countryside and its associated ideals of gentility, stewardship, and service. He can, though he has not found the opportunity to do so in a while, sail dinghies (having been a member for a few years of the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club) and ski.
He writes occasionally on these themes—international order, constitutionalism, tradition, and the cultural life of institutions—and links to some of his writing can be found elsewhere on this website. Born in Hong Kong and educated in Britain, he is now looking to make a life in the country that educated him, while remaining shaped by the city, and the wider histories, from which he came.
Alexander welcomes you to this personal website, and hopes you are truly comfortable. He invites you to take a look around.