42.3736° N · 71.1097° W Cambridge, Massachusetts
田浩南
Master in Public Policy Candidate · Harvard Kennedy School
Who blocks, who stands behind the blocker, and what international institutions can still decide.
I am a Master in Public Policy candidate at Harvard Kennedy School. I study how international organizations decide, what their veto rules actually do, and how the Arctic is governed as it opens to the world.
Select a place to open its photographs.
How states, and the institutions they build, handle war, coercion and the actors who work in the shadows: from the Security Council's answer to conflict next door, to the hackers a state tolerates and uses.
Why international organizations are built the way they are, and what their rules do once they exist: who holds a veto, who hides behind it, and who can rewrite the founding bargain.
Cambridge, MA · 42.37° N
My work sits where the formal rules of international institutions meet the politics that hide behind them.
At Harvard Kennedy School I concentrate in International and Global Affairs, with a focus on data and research methods. My research asks who ends up exercising a veto, who stays out of sight behind the member that blocks, and how the composition of a deciding body changes what it is willing to ask of others. Much of it is on the UN Security Council, where elected members rotate on a fixed calendar and so offer a rare view of an institution responding to who is in the room.
A second line of work concerns the Arctic. It began with a semester of Arctic studies at the University of Lapland and a dissertation, mentored at Oxford, on the legal and geopolitical obstacles to commercial shipping on the Northern Sea Route. At Harvard I am a research assistant with the Belfer Center’s Arctic Initiative, a course assistant for Policy and Social Innovations for the Changing Arctic, and I am writing my Policy Analysis Exercise for the WWF Global Arctic Programme on Chinese shipping and environmental risk in the Bering Strait.
I hold degrees from Duke University and Duke Kunshan University, and studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford as a visiting student. Before Harvard I worked in the World Economic Forum’s Beijing office. I was a Rhodes Scholarship finalist for China in 2025. This year I serve as president of the Greater China Society at Harvard Kennedy School.
Away from research, I photograph the places this work takes me.
Two themes, one question: what rules do to power.
Featured paper
Elected members enter and leave the Security Council on a fixed calendar. I use that calendar to ask what changes when a state bordering an armed conflict sits at the table: how quickly the Council responds, and what its resolutions ask of the conflict's neighbourhood.
Under any rule that lets one member block, the record shows who chose to be seen blocking, not who opposed. Evidence from the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union and from Security Council vetoes.
Like the privateers of earlier centuries, Russia's hacking groups serve the state while answering to it only loosely. How does the Russian state manage the hackers it tolerates and uses, and when do these privateers stay loyal, slip their leash or turn against it?
When a member can veto an amendment, can it also veto the outcome if others leave and build a successor? A census of amendment rules in 76 organizations and eight predecessor–successor episodes.
A country-by-country reexamination of the link between the 2025 aid cuts and armed conflict in Africa.
Taking the route recommended by China's Maritime Safety Administration as its baseline, the dissertation weighs the legal and geopolitical obstacles to commercial transit of the Northern Sea Route: disputes over international straits, Russia's historic-waters and straight-baseline claims, and the demands of marine environmental protection.
Notes from the Arctic Initiative
The record of a veto shows who was willing to be seen saying no, not everyone who stood behind it.
Where the research meets practice
Harvard's first course on the Arctic
Durham · Kunshan · Oxford · Rovaniemi · Seoul · Cambridge
Chinese (native), English (fluent), Russian (elementary). R and Python.
Letters, questions and invitations are welcome.
Harvard Kennedy School
79 John F. Kennedy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
