Emile Dirks

Dr. Emile Dirks is a senior research associate at the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto, where he researches contemporary Chinese politics, authoritarian policing practices, and transnational repression. He has written extensively on state surveillance in China and is the co-author of a forthcoming book on how China governs its diaspora.

Emile has served as a visiting scholar at Yunnan University’s School of Public Administration, a non-resident research associate at the London School of Economics and Political Science’s former International Drug Policy Unit, and a Futures Fellow with the Mercator Institute for China Studies. His writings on Chinese politics have appeared in outlets like The New York Times, Brookings, The Globe and Mail, and Foreign Policy, and he has testified on China’s human rights record before the United States’ Congressional-Executive Commission on China. Emile has a PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto and an MSc in China in Comparative Perspective from the London School of Economics and Political Science.