Dr. Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova
Head of China Studies Centre at Rīga Stradiņš University
Deputy Director of Latvian Institute of International Affairs
Member of European Think-tank Network on China (ETNC)
Dr. Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova is a China scholar and a discourse analyst. She has held research fellowships at Fudan, Stanford, Oxford and Hokkaido Universities, and is affiliated with King’s College London and MERICS. She is the author of Perfect Imbalance: China and Russia (World Scientific, 2022) and the editor of Discourse, Rhetoric and Shifting Political Behaviour in China (Routledge, 2023). Una is Head of the China Studies Centre at Riga Stradins University, Deputy Director of the Latvian Institute of International Affairs, and a member of European Think-tank Network on China (ETNC).
At DE-CONSPIRATOR, Una is a part of a team of China experts who are mapping PRC information manipulation conceptualisation, as well as strategies, and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) in Europe. She is responsible for running project tasks and deliverables on comparisons between perpetrator approaches to information manipulation abroad, as well as research into improvement of TTPs coding and classification, based on specific behaviours of China and Russia. As previously Una had mostly worked with qualitative methods, she is benefiting from the project as a learning opportunity for methodological and topical expansion.
When asked to share a memorable anecdote from the project, one story immediately stood out: “When everyone came together for the inaugural project meet-up in Istanbul, we quickly realized that as we all come from all over Europe the partners each pronounce the consortium name differently: dE-conspirator, de-CONspirator, de-conSPIrator, you name it. So, during the conference dinner we came to an agreement that the best possible way to refer to the consortium, is, of course, to imagine how Arnold Schwarzenegger would call it if our consortium were to featured in one of the Terminator films: “DE-CON-SPI-RATORRR”. There is just no better way!”
Access below one of the latest reports from Dr. Bērziņa-Čerenkova:
“INEVITABILITY”: Capturing Strategic Ambiguity in Xi Jinping’s China
UA Bērziņa‐Čerenkova
World Affairs 188 (2)