School of Social and Political Science

Background

I am an international politics academic editor with an interdisciplinary background and interrelated research interests, spanning across critical security studies, (US) foreign policy and empire.

I hold an MA in International Peace and Security from King’s College London and an MSc in Empires, Colonialism and Globalization from the London School of Economics (LSE). For my undergraduate studies, I completed a BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at the University of Warwick.

For the past four years, I have served as the Book Reviews Editor for International Affairs (Chatham House), a highly ranked International Relations journal that seeks to bridge the gap between academic research and policy relevance. Prior to that, I was part of the editorial team at The World Today magazine. I am often involved in the podcasting world, having previously hosted Undercurrents and served as a world politics expert for The Week Unwrapped.

I write a regular blog and a quarterly column on the latest books in the field of IR for International Affairs and I have written a range of op-eds, magazine articles and book reviews, including on the pitfalls of the 'China threat' debate, the politics of language and empire and the prospects of a post-Covid-19 Marshall Plan.

PhD

My project, Empire, security and identity: situating the ‘China threat’ within US imperial order-making, traces and problematizes the emergence of a 'China threat' narrative within US foreign policy debates over the last century. It is partly funded by the John Peterson Memorial Scholarship and supervised by Dr. Oliver Turner and Dr. Nicola Nymalm.

I am currently working on a genealogy of the ‘China threat’ debate, focusing on how the existing literature has overlooked the role of US empire in shaping US knowledge production on China. In particular, I am interested in the circulation of knowledge on China and in developing an understanding of how the so-called 'China experts' have perceived, portrayed and assessed China across different stages of US imperial development. 

I draw on poststructuralist, sociological and historical IR, going beyond nation-state boundaries and top-level policy-makers. Methodologically, archival research and discourse analysis inform my account of the relational nature of threat perceptions, which aims to shed light on a wider matrix of threats within which the 'China threat' narrative can be examined. In the process, I seek to complicate understandings of US identity (as fixed and exceptional) as the key driver of US foreign policy and to evaluate the impact of Eurocentric narratives of older East–West encounters.

Presentations

Vieira, Mariana. 'Mirror, mirror on the wall—is China the most threatening of them all?'. 18th EISA Pan-European Conference on International Relations (PEC), University of Bologna, Italy. 2025.

Vieira, Mariana. 'Empire, security and identity: Problematizing the US ‘China threat’ debate within American imperial imagination(s)'. PIR PhD Research Showcase, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK. 2025.

Vieira, Mariana. 'Concept note: Encountering encounters'. Encounters and Communities in Historical International Relations Workshop, University of Groningen, Netherlands. 2024.