Thitinan Pongsudhirak

Thitinan Pongsudhirak is one of Thailand’s most respected authorities on domestic and international politics. He is Professor of International Relations at Chulalongkorn University and Director of its Institute of Security and International Studies (ISIS).

Pongsudhirak brings an international perspective to Thai politics. He studied in the US at Santa Barbara and Johns Hopkins before moving to the UK for his PhD. He completed this at the London School of Economics where he was awarded the UK’s best dissertation prize for his work on the 1997 Thai financial crisis.

Thitinan Pongsudhirak pursued a career in academia thereafter and has been a visiting fellow at Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University, University of Victoria in New Zealand and Yangon University. He currently serves on several editorial boards of academic journals, including the Journal of Democracy.

A prolific author, Thitinan Pongsudhirak has written several books and over 1,000 opinion articles in international media. His work has been featured in Project Syndicate, The Bangkok Post, The Straits Times, Nikkei Asian Review, South China Morning Post and the Financial Times. As an analyst on Thailand and ASEAN, he regularly appears on brodcast media too. Pongsudhirak is a familiar face on CNN, BBC, Bloomberg, Aljazeera and NHK.

Pongsudhirak’s current work focuses on the geopolitics of ASEAN and the Indo-Pacific in view of US-China rivalry. In 2015 Thitinan Pongsudhirak was awarded a prize for excellence in opinion writing from Society of Publishers in Asia. In March 2018 he was appointed ASEAN@50 Fellow by New Zealand’s Minister of Foreign Affairs & Trade; and in May 2019, Pongsudhirak was selected as Australia-ASEAN Fellow at Sydney’s Lowy Institute.