Senior Fellow and Professor of International Relations at the Institute of Security and International Studies, Chulalongkorn University
Thitinan Pongsudhirak is Professor of International Relations at Chulalongkorn University’s faculty of political science and Senior Fellow at its Institute of Security and International Studies in Bangkok. Thitinan has held visiting positions at Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University, University of Victoria in New Zealand, and Yangon University, and currently serves on several editorial boards of academic journals, including Journal of Democracy. He has authored a host of articles, books, book chapters and over 1,000 opinion articles in mass media such as Project Syndicate, The Bangkok Post, Nikkei Asian Review, The Straits Times, South China Morning Post, International New York times, and Financial Times. As an analyst on Thailand/ASEAN-Southeast Asia, his comments and views have appeared regularly in international media, including Aljazeera, BBC, CNN, Bloomberg, CNBC, NHK, DW, among others. Prior to his academic and think-tank career, Thitinan worked for the BBC World Service and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) in London. His current work focuses on the comparative politics and geopolitics/geoeconomics of ASEAN and the Indo-Pacific in view of the US-China rivalry and competition.
In 2015, he was recognised for excellence in opinion writing by Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA). During 2017-present, he holds the appointment as International Advisory Board Member of Asia-New Zealand Foundation (ANZF). In March 2018, he was appointed ASEAN@50 Fellow by New Zealand’s Minister of Foreign Affairs & Trade. In May 2019, he was selected as Australia-ASEAN Fellow at Sydney’s Lowy Institute. From 2021-present, he is senior advisor for geopolitics with Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES). From January 2023-present, he is appointed an independent expert of ADMM+ Cybersecurity and Information Centre of Excellence (ACICE). In January 2024, Thitinan was awarded a commendation by the Japanese government for his work on Japan-Thailand and Japan-ASEAN relations. For the past two decades, he has been a columnist with The Bangkok Post. He completed degrees at the University of California at Santa Barbara (with Distinction) and Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, with a PhD from London School of Economics which won the UK’s best dissertation prize in 2002.
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The University of Hong Kong
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