Professor William Hurst

William Hurst is the Chong Hua Professor of Chinese Development in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge, where he also serves as co-director of the Centre for Geopolitics. His primary areas of research and expertise are domestic politics in China and Indonesia, as well as international relations across East and Southeast Asia.

A particular hallmark of all Professor Hurst’s work is careful analysis of subnational and micro-level politics. This offers leverage for combining insights from what are usually distinct fields of comparative politics and international relations.

He is the author of Ruling Before the Law: the Politics of Legal Regimes in China and Indonesia (Cambridge 2018) and The Chinese Worker after Socialism< (Cambridge 2009), as well as editor of four other books. He has published more than two dozen peer-reviewed articles and chapters, and penned more than thirty op-eds, essays, and other shorter pieces.